|
You also have to remember that when the shift was made from 4.0T/6.0NA gasoline engines and 5.5 liter turbodiesels to 2.0T/3.4NA gasoline and 3.7 liter turbodiesel engines, those engines were capped at 600bhp because of air restrictors. That's no more, or possibly even less, than the current LMP1s. Even the big engined cars at most made about 700hp max in race conditions.
The era of the big, fire-breathing GT1 cars is over. Such cars are too big and powerful to be worth using in GT3, and the cars that have run in GTE/GT2 that could've been also used in GT1 are no longer in production. Namely the 7 liter Corvettes (the 427 died except as a crate motor when the C6 Corvette left production), the Dodge Viper is on the way out (if not already out of production) for the foreseeable future, and the ACO won't allow the Corvette C7 Z06 to race because both GTE and the old GT1 regs even limited forced induction engine capacity to 4.0 liters (the Z06 has a 6.2 liter supercharged V8)
Not to mention that no car maker wants to race full on supercars or hypercars in endurance racing.
I myself liked the air restrictor LMP1 days better than now, because I don't like the strategy of lift and coast and dependency on hybrids or alternative fuels for performance breaks. Not to mention that air restrictor BOP is cheaper and easier to enforce than fuel flow and other EOT related performance balancing. But that's what we have now. We have narrow cars, on skinny tires, that have to coast to game a laptime. The way that the ACO have placed incentive on hybrids has jacked up the cost, as well as other tech reg changes. I believe as Audi believed, and Peugeot believes, that different strategies with ICE and hybrids should have a near equal chance to win, rather than all but mandating one way to go to be successful.
From 1999-2013 we had varying varieties of cars, all of which had their merits and were interesting. Today, the tech is interesting, but I'm not in favor of narrower cars, fuel flow limits/lift and coast, and pushing "green" agendas at the risk of damaging variety and different ways of doing things.
|