Quote:
Originally Posted by Hawkwood
What he's saying or how he said it?
Because what he's saying is logical, although probably incorrect.
Oreca designed what seems to be an awful car. The post you replied to above is asking whether Oreca might have done that on purpose due to Oreca's links to the Toyota program.
I however, think that Oreca did a bad job for one obvious reason, and that reason is easily explained by Oreca directly:
"We designed this car in record time!"
Oreca championed this as a good thing, but in my opinion it is not a good phrase to hear about the design of anything.
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What makes it an 'awful car'? Sure it's doing rather similar performances to the old B12/60 but you can't make any comparisons of modern privateer car to the factories because of $$$$$$$$ differences and increasing development war and EoT shenanigans, so the only possible chassis you can compare it to is the Kodewa-Kolles-Experiment. And until that project is properly running (no overweight + pro drivers) even that is waiting for judgement.
The engine performance was lacking for sure, I said that late last summer already, but that had nothing to do with Oreca design.
Oreca might have said 'record time' (and you know,
knowing this sort of thing it really was an achievement), but that still resulted in 12 month design/constructing phase and caused Rebellion to miss the pre-season testing + first race of last year. Doing it any slower would've meant no Le Mans, is that what you wanted? Hello Dome.
In any case, why would've Oreca wanted to "sabotage" them? Oreca helps Toyota in track operations but that's pretty much the extent of their relationship, you really think they would harm a chassis of their own design in order to keep the distance between two? That's crazy talk. Besides there's no way this team and car would've ever been close to Toyota, not unless ACO lowers the minimum weight to 650kg or something absurd like that. That's just the way it is.
I'm sure Oreca would love to sell more of these chassis around, but as we know the privateer side of the pond is going through rocky faces (and ACO isn't blameless for that).
What I would like to say though is that they should've designed the chassis with more engine options in mind, the time it seems to take the modications seems like forever.