Quote:
Originally Posted by Maelochs
This whole "Make it look like a street car" is obnoxious BS to me. Prototypes should be designed to race, not to look like anything.
The who notion of a "prototype" class as I understand it is a class of vehicles designed not for production and sales for use on public roads, but of cars designed and built purely for racing.
I want P1 to be the all-out, anything-goes, maximum-power, spare-no-expense, damn-the-torpedoes racetrack spaceships which they pretty much always have been--from a Jag D-Type to a 907 to a 917 to a 956/962 to the Pugs and Audis which have dominated Le Mans in this century.
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pro·to·type/ˈprōdəˌtīp/
noun
a first, typical or preliminary model of something, especially a machine, from which other forms are developed or copied.
My gripe about prototype racing is that for many years, they have been prototypes of nothing.
The old homologation rules were aimed at keeping the prototypes from having no connection to anything. In my opinion, the concept went wrong when they dumped the homologation requirement. The D Type Jag and Ford GT 40 were entirely different things from a 917. If you had the money, you could buy a road-going version of the D Type and the GT 40. Not so with the 917.
My perspective on this subject is almost the opposite. I think the whole "prototype" (of nothing) concept should be dumped and replaced by a supercar class. To allow there to be some sort of order to it, there would need to be fuel consumption limits they all have to meet, but then it would be a battle of the best between Bugatti, Lamborghini, McLaren, Stryker, anybody who wanted to design a supercar that would also have a decent shot at winning Le Mans. Of course they would need a good deal of safety improvements before they took the track, but a supercar approach to the top class would actually generate a lot more buzz than these purpose-built prototypes of nothing that race now.
Or, a true prototype class like G56, but have some really basic rules and there would be several of them battling it out.