[LM24 Race] 2018 Le Mans 24 Hours Race Thread

[tux]

Originally Posted by The ginger prince

Trussers on RLM reckoned it was a glitch - the speed trap isnt a "gun" - more 2 timing loops that work out the speed / time between the points.

I can see that.

[rubberduck]

Originally Posted by PascaLM

I don't know if already posted : new picture of the Cetilar Dallara

More

[JHamilton]

Originally Posted by Aysedasi

No. I think he came here to win Le Mans....

Just so we're clear, I agree.

[S griffin]

Originally Posted by rubberduck

More

Not what they needed at this time

[GORDON STREETER]

Originally Posted by Aysedasi

No. I think he came here to win Le Mans....

The terrestrial TV out here thinks so as well with "watch Fernando win LeMans"

[kvenom]

Aston got their BOP bump, now to release the further 20kgs of sand in the trunk and presto, they'll be fighting up front.

[kyoung]

Originally Posted by kvenom

Aston got their BOP bump, now to release the further 20kgs of sand in the trunk and presto, they'll be fighting up front.

I think you’re underestimating what a truly uncompetitive car they are capable of building.

[Akrapovic]

Originally Posted by kyoung

I think you’re underestimating what a truly uncompetitive car they are capable of building.

Playing devils advocate here...

If the car is going to be BoP'd massively, then why bother spending lots of money to make it competitive? As long as it can get enough breaks from the BoP to catch up, then it's fine. From a business point of view, it seems like a stupid idea to spend lots of money to get lap time that would otherwise be given to you for free.

Spend £10m. Get slowed down.
Spend £1m. Get sped up to the same speed as the £10m car.

When you look at it that way, seems Aston made a sensible business decision. As long as the car is reliable, serviceable and has good margins for the drivers to feel comfortable, the BoP will deal with the lap time.

It's different when you're actually fast and pretend you're not.

[kyoung]

Originally Posted by Akrapovic

Playing devils advocate here...

If the car is going to be BoP'd massively, then why bother spending lots of money to make it competitive? As long as it can get enough breaks from the BoP to catch up, then it's fine. From a business point of view, it seems like a stupid idea to spend lots of money to get lap time that would otherwise be given to you for free.

Spend £10m. Get slowed down.
Spend £1m. Get sped up to the same speed as the £10m car.

When you look at it that way, seems Aston made a sensible business decision. As long as the car is reliable, serviceable and has good margins for the drivers to feel comfortable, the BoP will deal with the lap time.

It's different when you're actually fast and pretend you're not.

I don’t disagree with anything you have said, last years car was AMR gold standard, uncompetitive car, ludicrous BoP, Lemans class victory. Why change a winning formula?

[ivozet]

ACO, MACO, where are AMG, AUDI,BENTLEY, LEXUS, HONDA....? Will be again a circus race. The stupid french organizers kissing and inviting majority of american ******* teams.

[airbusA346]

Originally Posted by kvenom

Aston got their BOP bump, now to release the further 20kgs of sand in the trunk and presto, they'll be fighting up front.

- Aston have been given turbo boost increase and -10kg.
- BMW and Corvette -10kg
- Ford +8kg
- Porsche +10kg
- Ferrari +1 litre of fuel

- Am Porsche +10kg
- Am Aston -10kg

http://www.dailysportscar.com/2018/0...e-changes.html

[JHamilton]

Originally Posted by ivozet

ACO, MACO, where are AMG, AUDI,BENTLEY, LEXUS, HONDA....? Will be again a circus race. The stupid french organizers kissing and inviting majority of american ******* teams.

Yeah all of two American teams.

And the ACO cannot force a manufacturer to build a car or to race.

[Akrapovic]

Originally Posted by ivozet

ACO, MACO, where are AMG, AUDI,BENTLEY, LEXUS, HONDA....? Will be again a circus race. The stupid french organizers kissing and inviting majority of american ******* teams.

Some of us happen to love teams like Corvette coming over.

There's more than enough European and Asian teams to fill the Le Mans grid without inviting American teams. The Americans are there because it's awesome and everyone wants them there - not because of lack of European cars.

[JHamilton]

Originally Posted by kyoung

I don’t disagree with anything you have said, last years car was AMR gold standard, uncompetitive car, ludicrous BoP, Lemans class victory. Why change a winning formula?

Prodrive has 3 class victories at Le Mans outside of last year. Besides the failed prototype and the engine in the first iteration of the Vantage, they have built some amazing race cars across multiple disciplines.

[Deleted]

The practice and quali went pretty much as I expected, both in good and bad... but tomorrow's gonna be amazing, LM never disappoints in the race

I see a P1 meltdown, certainly by night and early morning the latest

Originally Posted by JHamilton

Prodrive has 3 class victories at Le Mans outside of last year. Besides the failed prototype and the engine in the first iteration of the Vantage, they have built some amazing race cars across multiple disciplines.

You forgot to count in their 2003 Ferrari 550 win in GTS/GT1

Anyway in regards to their Aston chassis

DBR9 - Great (except when run with those terrible, cheap Pirellis)
Lola P1 Body panels and engine - Alright
Vantage GT2 - Weak
AMR-One - Crap
All GT3 and GT4 cars - BoP wagons so doesn't matter what they are
Vantage GTE - Weak as before - it is the same exact old GT2 car as before just mildly modded after all - but the new BoP regulations that had been established shortly before this thing was taken over by the factory team made weakness irrelevant
Vantage GTE 2.0 - Same as above

The point is that the first four in the list were technology driven and succeeded/failed because of that, whereas the ones below them are BoP driven where it doesn't if they're terrible base cars because they're gonna be 'made winners' anyway. The Vantages certainly have the most aid of all year after year, as well as shortest budgets.

Which, as said before, is actually wise because why would you waste time and money for creating something good when you can exploit the broken rules this way?

[Maelochs]

Originally Posted by Akrapovic

Spend £10m. Get slowed down.
Spend £1m. Get sped up to the same speed as the £10m car.

Not sure it costs a lot less to build a slow car. it's not like they can replace all the alloy with cast iron and the kevlar with fiberglass.

And also ... the car still has to be capable of racing for 24 hours, otherwise it cannot make use of the BoP breaks. The engine has to be able to survive 24 hours at higher boost and if ten kg were the make/break, Ford and Porsche are now irretrievably broken.

I don't think ProDrive Deliberately built a slow car ... I think Ford and Porsche just did better.

But ... it makes for some humorous posts and I like being amused. I really do appreciate what you have been posting. it is just close enough to plausible to both tickle and sting.

[kyoung]

Originally Posted by JHamilton

Prodrive has 3 class victories at Le Mans outside of last year. Besides the failed prototype and the engine in the first iteration of the Vantage, they have built some amazing race cars across multiple disciplines.

Sorry if I was vague, was referring to the previous GT car as run in this race. They had similar BoP in previous years, but couldn’t take advantage of it because of various forms of incompetence, i.e. crashes, poor fuel-pit strategy. Has Aston ever built amazing cars, sure they have.

[Akrapovic]

Of course it costs less to build a slow car. Not as much as £9m less obviously, but of course it does. Otherwise, it'd cost the same to produce an Audi R18 as it does a ByKolles. The big cost is always wages - if you've got 20 more people on the job then you're adding almost a £1m a year to the budget. And then there's all the testing that comes with it, etc etc. Testing at Sebring is how you produce a good car, but that's another half a million or so thrown on top of the budget. The material costs won't change, but all of the money is in research and development, testing and staff wages. It's the same when you see articles saying "the component costs of the new iPhone only add up to £95!". Yeah, they do, but the amount of money sunk into staff wages is what you're paying for, not the physical materials themselves.

I do think it's hard to say "Ford and Porsche did it better" though. Based on...the BoP'd lap times? We literally have absolutely no base times for any of the GTE (or GT3 for that matter) cars. So seeing who did a good job with speed is completely impossible now since the speed we see is not the speed of the car. I don't want that to sound negative, because I don't mean it like that. I just think the Aston comments need a bit of perspective.

We have absolutely no idea if the Aston is terrible or it just has a bad BoP. We have absolutely no idea if the Porsche is brilliant, or has a good BoP.

As I said, all you need to do is make the car reliable, serviceable and driveable. As long as it's within 10 seconds of the others, it can be BoP'd into the speed envelope.

[Deleted]

Good pace & lots of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Bad base car
Good pace & not a lot of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Good base car
Bad pace & lots of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Bad base car
Bad pace & not a lot of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Politically unfavorable car for whatever reason that can be either good or bad but more likely bad

That's always been the baseline for me. And which is why Ferrari has been the baseline car for Bop ever since 458 was introduced... it (or it's current successor) would win everyone by 5 laps on unbopped competition. The less free gifts you have from baseline while you still retain level of performance tells you that the chassis is good

The only real counter argument here is that we do not have public lists for special waivers, as the manufacturers have chosen to not release them to us (out of shame?). So we don't know the full picture on how hollow rule bending really is. But we do have clues

If anyone listened to the Tech Talk from RLM yesterday, and what Gemma said of the BMW waivers... well...

[tux]

BMW are hardly pulling up trees though and are in the same boat as AMR in that it’s the first year of running the new car whereas everyone else has had at least 2 years. Truthfully I’m not sure the Vantage is all that good but I don’t think we will really know for a long time. Personally I’m not sure the BOP adjustments from today will make all that much difference and i feel that in race conditions the GTE field will be closer,.

[Akrapovic]

Originally Posted by Chiana

Good pace & lots of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Bad base car
Good pace & not a lot of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Good base car
Bad pace & lots of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Bad base car
Bad pace & not a lot of favorable adjustments from LMGTE base values = Politically unfavorable car for whatever reason that can be either good or bad but more likely bad

But you don't know if the base BoP it got was good to start with. If I build a new car and it's great, but the base BoP it gets gifted just happens to cripple it, then even with favourable adjustments, it's going to look bad. And since the Auto-BoP is all super secret, we'll never know how it decides.

tl;dr BoP is a mess.

[Deleted]

Originally Posted by Akrapovic

But you don't know if the base BoP it got was good to start with. If I build a new car and it's great, but the base BoP it gets gifted just happens to cripple it, then even with favourable adjustments, it's going to look bad. And since the Auto-BoP is all super secret, we'll never know how it decides.

tl;dr BoP is a mess.

By Base BoP I mean what the regulations actually state (or used to state) the cars to have before it gets all messed up

And that is the minimum weight of 1245kg, air restrictor size in accordance of the displacement table, and so on

The more gifts or penalties they get from those baselines, that tells the first story

[Aysedasi]

Originally Posted by GORDON STREETER

The terrestrial TV out here thinks so as well with "watch Fernando win LeMans"

Of course, but it does him no service at all.....

[bobec]

Originally Posted by airbusA346

- Aston have been given turbo boost increase and -10kg.
- BMW and Corvette -10kg
- Ford +8kg
- Porsche +10kg
- Ferrari +1 litre of fuel

- Am Porsche +10kg
- Am Aston -10kg

http://www.dailysportscar.com/2018/0...e-changes.html

That seems so weird to me, making adjustments between qualifying and race day. I was actually excited to see what the race pace was going to be compared to qualifying, but thanks to the ACO I'm not all that excited anymore.

[TF110]

Originally Posted by Chiana

By Base BoP I mean what the regulations actually state (or used to state) the cars to have before it gets all messed up

And that is the minimum weight of 1245kg, air restrictor size in accordance of the displacement table, and so on

The more gifts or penalties they get from those baselines, that tells the first story

That's a start, but doesn't take into account car shape, downforce total, drag etc. The Ford GT is super low and sleek. It's probably got the lowest drag. But then you see what size and type engine it has and compare that to the rest. Not all auto manufacturers have supercars they can enter with a low roofline about the height of lmps. Some do but they would rather run cars like the 488 or the 911 instead of the 918 or La Ferrari. It's a complicated mess, like Akrapovic said. If it were up to me I'd make the rules close to what 2000's GT1 was with a weight limit like 1150kg, set dimensions, aero part rules, and add a fuel flow rate for starters. Solve the discrepancies with weight penalties or something like success ballast. Works pretty well in Super GT.