Quote:
Originally Posted by Maelochs
Mazda was heavily involved with the design (well, styling) of its DPi .... And as I recall Cadillac (or some branch of GM) collaborated on their car.
Who cares, though? 
And yes ... the DPi, the Gen 4 DP, and WEC's new hypercar are All about marketing. All, entirely. "Styling cues" are all about being able to pretend the racing car is in some way related to the street car. With the hypercar, aero is Deliberately sacrificed in favor of style ... as it was with the Gen 4 "Corvette" DP.
The DPi trend stated back in the fading days of the Rolex Sports Car Series, when manufacturers wanted the engine name listed ahead of the chassis name ... BMW wanted the winning car to be a BMW-Riley, not a Riley-BMW as the Euros had always done it. Ford wanted a Ford-Riley, not a Riley-Ford, to be in the news.
Now the DPis have bodywork and an engine from a dues-paying manufacturer, and no one mentions who made the base LMP2 chassis ... which was the workaround the merged series used in order to get the manufacturer's name in the news with every mention.
Not many people commented on the death of that tradition ... the chassis-maker getting first (or any) billing.
Again ... who cares how much Nissan added to the bodywork? As far as I know, None of the DPi chassis are so radically modified that they could escape intellectual-property lawsuits .... if the factories hadn't purchased naming rights.
The "Cadillac" is still just a Dallara-Cadillac ... the Nissan is still an Oreca-Nissan .... the chassis have not been changed beyond a few new engine- and accessory-mounting ptints.
Since it is all marketing ... we pretend Cadillac actually built a race car .... Nissan is just more up-front about it. |
Completely agree with your statement.
Anyway to me the only real complete dpi in spirit is mazda dpi, the only car that has a design to look like (less vaguely) mazda street cars style. Aero development was put aside giving aesthetics priority, basically what aston did back in 2009 with lola-aston lmp1.
Acura and Nissan dpi are basically oreca and ligier with a different nose and underbody changes to fit the engine. Cadillac dpi has a more revised aero than a dallara lmp2, but you can't say at all cadillac dpi has the same style identity of street cadillacs.
Anyway to me is everything good so far, shame that any other manufacturer seems interested to step in... hope at least mazda and HPD will let privates use their cars.