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Old 1 Jul 2017, 16:16 (Ref:3748137)   #4968
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!
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Originally Posted by Akrapovic View Post
They're BoP'd down, so I imagine there's room for more power. Caddy especially. The Nissan isn't the engine from the ByKolles, but that has a lot of power to spare if the fuel regs were opened up. Mazda...well, you can't really build rules for car that blows up if the wind changes direction.

I don't really see the problem with the current IMSA Prototype class, and I really don't think it has been "screwed up". We'd all like new tyres, but that won't happen given the money Continental provides. And separating DPi and P2 at this stage is maybe a bit early. You'd end up with 2 small classes. We already have people complaining about GTE-Am and GTE-Pro being an "everybody wins" situation, but there's far more argument for those classes being split than DPi and P2, in terms of sustainable entries IMO.
I've already been on tirades about how the ACO messed up LMP1 with the hybrid/ERS Incentive/fuel flow regs, so I'm not going to restate all of that here. But the fact is that on the DPI front, you have factory supported teams who clearly developed their own bodywork for their own advantage, not just to put road car styling cues on them. Even Audi did that with their LMP1 cars, and to a similar extent to the Cadillac DPI (headlight shape mostly).

Because they were developed independently from the LMP2 cars (who have their homologation frozen with the ACO and were designed around a single engine platform), the DPIs were always going to be faster, due to manufacturer investments, which involved powertrain (engine), aerodynamics (why would DPI teams make their own bodywork? Not just to suit IMSA wanting to have road car styling cues, as the changes on the Cadillac for example aren't exclusively just to create brand identity), and even to a degree almost all the DPI teams having an all pro driver lineup.

Just because an all-pro LMP2 car can keep up with the DPIs doesn't mean that's the way it should be without BOP. If there was no BOP, the DPIs would probably be miles ahead of even an all pro LMP2 car.

The problem there is how close would they'd be to a LMP1 privateer car? Since they won't race together at the same venue (Kolles won't even be at Austin), we can't judge, but when you consider how outdated Kolles' car is, they were still able to pass a Toyota on the first lap of LM this year, at least until Tetre Rouge.

Granted, you have two of the three ACO spec LMP2 teams in IMSA right now that are in favor of a separate DPI and LMP2 class. And one of those teams right now has the only all pro LMP2 driver line ups. And Troy Fils (Spirit of Daytona/Visit Florida Racing owner) feels it's unfair to have the DPIs shackled to being kept to roughly LMP2 specs. Either he's die hard about running LM with a ACO spec LMP2 at some point and doesn't want any IMSA influenced BOP, or he's moving to a DPI next year and wants more room for development and more speed out of the cars.
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