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Old 4 Aug 2017, 21:45 (Ref:3757473)   #159
chernaudi
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chernaudi has a real shot at the championship!chernaudi has a real shot at the championship!chernaudi has a real shot at the championship!chernaudi has a real shot at the championship!chernaudi has a real shot at the championship!chernaudi has a real shot at the championship!
If that's so, then why aren't we seeing that? I'd bet that if you took the hybrid systems off the Porsche and Toyota, they'd still be faster. We have to also remember that the ACO opened up a lot of aero stuff on LMP1 cars in 2014--stuff that the private teams haven't been able to take advantage of.

My points are cost control and the fact that it's actually going to take a lot of concessions--basically to the point of BOP--to get privateers competitive with a modern factory effort.

The 15mm higher front diffuser lips and narrower/shorter rear diffusers on LMP1 factory cars are effectively BOP to try and slow them down and help LMP1 privateers catch up, as their cars are unaltered in the tech regs. And as we've seen, it's going to take a lot more than that to get them to catch up.

So they're going to get fuel flow meters probably the size of 30 inch water pipes relative to what Toyota will have next year (if Toyota are still around). May as well go back to running air restrictors on the privateer cars and give them ones the size of a drainage pipe (like what IMSA did with Intersport in the ALMS).

I though that the point of the fuel flow meters was to encourage fuel saving. If you're just going to give larger allowances of fuel flow and burn to privateer teams, what's the point if that's the point that the ACO and FIA were trying to make?

Privateers already should be given under the technical regs unlimited engine use (no 5 engines a season limit like for the factory cars), unlimited engine size, and being allowed to do more things with the aero on their cars. None of which even when combined will eliminate the gap up front I fear.

And how much could Toyota get pegged back next year if the ACO want to pull a 2007-08 and 2010 ALMS style of manufactured inter-class racing? Because like it or not, the ACO might have to go to such extremes to put on competitive races. I don't think that fans, or even Toyota, would put up with the one-sided sprint race results that sometimes happened in the ALMS in 2000-2002.

It's undeniable that almost everyone here thinks that LMP1 as it is has peaked, and it's time for a shake up/reset. Unfortunately, the forward looking views that lead to the current package if anything were ahead of their time, and now we have to go "backwards" to find a happy medium.
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