Saturday, August 21, 2021

24 Hours of Le Mans: Hour 11

Before we get to this next hour of racing, it is interesting to note that Frits van Eerd, who is the CEO of Jumbo Supermarkets in Holland and one of the people involved with the Racing Team Nederland LMP2 team, he owns three Spitfire airplanes.  So, he is a man who has done very well for himself, and he has put his money towards the things he enjoys.  If you are rich and yet you use your money to invest in classic cars or classic vehicles of any sort, more power to you.  Everyone wonders why we don't have enough coverage here at Le Mans at night.  Well, it is plainly too dark, mate.  You see the headlights and that's about it.  It is harder to see the Mulsanne straight than it is the corners.


Another interesting factoid for you all as we continue here at Le Mans.  On clockwise circuits, which many of the classic tracks like Le Mans and others, are, in Europe, the prototype cars used to all be right hand drive.  This dates back to the fabulous roadsters that raced at Le Mans for the better part of three or four decades, into the classic beginnings of GT and prototype racing, all the way up to the 1980s and '90s, the Group C era and into the GT era in the mid-1990s.  But now, these cars are predominantly left-hand drive, including the Hypercars and the GTE cars as well as the LMP2's.  That is so the fuelers and the drivers (when they are swapping over between stints), don't fall over each other and get in each other’s way.  

Another reason is, if the driver is on the righthand side, it is what you want for the corners.  Grab a coffee or food or whatever you'd like and settle in because we have a whole half of this great motor race to go yet.  We have a Slow Zone on the circuit right now, but it is hard to tell as to what the reason could be.  Currently in GTE Am, the class leader is the #83 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE.  Dane Nicklas Nielsen is at the controls, sharing the car of course with Francois Perrodo of France and Alessio Rovera of Italy.  We ride aboard, through the darkness, with Ben Barnicoat aboard the #71 Inception Racing GTE Am Ferrari 488 GTE, as he is chasing an identical car, the #60 Iron Lynx Ferrari, Paolo Ruberti, the Italian, at the wheel of it.

Some mechanics are tired, others are wide awake.  They ought to be getting a little shuteye between pit stops while the cars are out there racing.  It is hard to do though because of the adrenaline factor.  Indeed, from the fixed cameras, we can see how these mega bright headlights do pierce the gloom.  Through Mulsanne corner as we follow Ben Barnicoat on his lap.  The #708 Glickenhaus is in the pit lane and it looks like a scheduled service, here at 2:00 A.M. in France.  Olivier Pla is currently driving Glickenhaus #708.  The Glickenhaaus is a magnificent race car.

The design of it is so amazingly retro compared to the competitors from Toyota and Alpine which have a more modern aura to them.  Now, as lovely a shape and design as this car has, we know it has been fragile for the whole race.  It is now stopped at the end of the pit lane past the board for the RFID sign that reads the tires on the cars as they go through back onto the track.  It seems that Olivier Pla may have been clear to go and there was not stoplight on with a red or green light at the end of pit lane.  There used to be a purple light down there to signal nighttime during the 1980s when the awesome Group C cars raced at Le Mans, from Porsche, Lancia, Mercedes, and others.  The #71 Ferrari is run by Inception Motorsports.  Sean Goff, Ian Smith, and former driver turned team manager Bas Leinders, from Belgium, run that team.

We have four teams this year at Le Mans with all rookie drivers.  They are all doing a great job despite not being to the track before and Inception have had a very busy time this year in 2021.  They've been doing a lot of different championships like GT Open, Asian Le Mans, and SRO Europe.  Our leader in GTE Pro is in the lane now, look.  The #51 AF Corse Ferrari, Alessandro Pier Guidi currently driving.  Kevin Estre is bringing the #92 Porsche to the lane as well.  This is the eleventh pit stop for that car if any Porsche fans are keeping score at home.  For some reason we still have the slow zone, and the brakes are not working on that car when it stopped.  

Maybe the electronics are doing smething odd.  Michael Christensen has joined the Porsche GT factory team to share at Le Mans with Neel Jani and Kevin Estre.  So, the Dane will be back on his way for his stint momentarily.  New tires, you can hear the rattle guns.  The race seems to be coming back to Porsche as they are biding their time and doing what they can.  They had some iffy times during the rain at the beginning of the race but they are coming back to the fore now, slowly gaining on Corvette and Ferrari.  Now, speaking of Corvette, we go on board with the brand new C8.R and this is the #63 car, the predominantly yellow car with Jordan Taylor at the controls.  Taylor has covered 135 laps so far.  Well over 900 some odd miles.  Now, this is funny.  Are the ARC Bratislava boys practicing pit stops or practicing boxing?  Don't get to rambunctious down there, boys.  Hardy har har.  As we know, many of the mechanics signal their drivers to pit by saying "box, box, box".  But, that's the box that they service the car in, not boxing, much less putting items into a box.  Oh boy.  I can see where this is going.  Better quit while I'm ahead, mate.  Strangely, we still have a slow zone on the road.  If the Ferrari is in the way, the marshals are taking their time about moving it.  This could impede traffic, but it also has a benefit where they are trying to not to do more damage to the car.

Double Yellow removed at marshal post six.  We still have the slow zone two posts back, at marshal post four.  Jordan Taylor takes the Corvette C8.R down to Arnage, the slowest turn on this legendary track.  Watch out for the wall.  It is so close down there, and we have seen many drivers crunch the barriers down there inadvertently over the years.  It juts out right at you.  The entry of that corner also sees a change of pavement and that's why the cars skate off the road.  Be cautious down there.  Corvette Racing have new management and Doug Fehan, former team boss, he is still an ambassador.  Risi Competizione are using their team from Europe to help.  The expense of bringing full teams to Europe to race has been prohibitive because of the cursed virus pandemic that still is a part of our daily lives in this world.  Lots of paperwork and red tape to deal with.  

Now, we might see where the slow zone is, but the camera crews show us something more humorous.  What is this?  A Ferrari dummy?  Nope.  That's one of the AF Corse team members posing, probably their fueler kitted up in his helmet, and the boys at Corvette Racing are laughing their heads off.  What is this shenanigans at 3AM?  Right now, the category leaders see Toyota #7 leading Hypercar and the overall, the #31 WRT car leading LMP2, Corvette Racing leading GTE Pro amid their giggle fest with the mechanics, and in GTE Am, maybe that dummy was sent to see that the #83 AF Corse Ferrari was still ahead in GTE Am, which it is.

We're still in a slow zone but no one has told us what the deal is.  Now, the yellow remains out.  One of the factory Ferrari's is crawling.  Everyone should be back to green and Ben Barnicoat zooms past GTE Am cars.  We look at the GTE Pro standings now, and Corvette #63 leads covering the rest of the field in the dvision by a single lap.  That is how it ought to be.  That shows how remarkably competitive GTE Pro is.  Factory Corvette ahead of two factory Ferrari's, ahead of two factory Porsche's, ahead of the American WeatherTech Porsche, ahead of the HubAuto Porsche which is a lap down, and the bottom of the deck, currently, sees the sister factory Corvette.

Alpine in the pit lane for scheduled service.  Andre Negrao, the Brazilian, behind the wheel.  No tires.  Fuel only, and he is down and away.  That car fourth overall a minute down on Robin Frijns in the #31 WRT LMP2 car.  Team WRT are right in the hunt here.  The Alpine had that wild spin earlier on and they are still in recovery mode.  All the LMP2's are close to the Hypercar machines.  Yifei Ye, the 21 year old Chinese driver, is managed by Neel Jani's dad.  Ye raced in Formula 3 in France and he won 16 races and won 11 races last year in Euro Formula Open in 2020 and he is of course now in the European Le Mans Series as well.

The battle for second in GTE Pro is heating up, simmering along well, thank you, between the two AF Corse Ferrari's.  The slow zone continues, and we are still glued to this fascinating scuffle in GTE Pro for the time being and yes indeed the Corvette boys are very interested.  Now then, we have a Slow Zone once again through the Dunlop curve and the esses on the way to Tetre Rouge.  Other pit crew members for other teams are quite tired and why shouldn't they be?  They have been preparing for this race all week and just now are getting ever closer to the halfway mark.  There's still a long, long way to go yet.  

As we get closer to halfway, once again (and we shall speak of this a little later as the sun comes up), we are getting to the point that my friends at the IMSA team at Action Express in the United States, would call "zombie land" in a 24 hour race, where the cars and drivers are just putting in the laps while the mechanics are doing their darnedest to get some shuteye between pit stops.  That is the point of the race we might just be at right now.  Jordan Taylor blasts his way down the incredible Mulsanne straight once again.  That is the signature of this track just like the high banks, the banking is the signature at Daytona International Speedway.  Now we ride aboard the overall leading #7 Toyota Hypercar which is running ahead of the sister car for Toyota Gazoo Racing, car #8.

This is the overall leader as mentioned.  Mike Conway is currently driving.  He has completed 147 laps.  Some people wonder about the future of LMP2 in the World Endurance Championship?  Will LMP3 be considered for the championship?  We will see, what Eurosport commentators Mark Cole and Chris Parsons have to say about that.  It is always interesting to hear what these two have to say, as they have been around sports car racing for a long time.  This is a major subject, to be honest.  This LMP2 class was going to run out at the end of next year in 2022.  But it is now being back up another year for certain reasons, so we will see the current cars until the end of 2023.
2024 will see a new LMP2 format.  LMP3 can't be used because the new LMP2 cars will be the basis of the LMDh class that we've all been so excited about if you have followed sports car racing.  Now, we have another Toyota pit stop.  Let's see which one has been instructed to box here.  This is the #8 car.  Now, back to the LMP2 story.  The ACO announced yesterday that they are working through new regulations as we hear over the Toyota radio to Sebastien Buemi, that the team is working through a refueling problem on the car.  

Now what on earth could this be?  How did this refueling kerfuffle crop up?  Toyota does have a refueling issue but only on this latest stop for the #8 machine.  That's strange.  C'est etrange.  Pourquoi la Toyota a-t-elle un probleme de revitaillment?  Maybe they didn't fill up enough at the most recent stop.  At Monza last time out they could not pick up enough petrol.  With LMP2, the ACO say they need to get the new regulations published by the end of this year in 2021 because of the manufacturers for LMDh needing to know the chassis to base their cars off of.  The same four companies that have the current franchise tender for building the cars will be included.  Oreca, Dallara, Multimatic, and Ligier are those four companies.  All of them are lining up manufacturers.  
It seems Audi, Porsche, and Lamborghini (all part of the Volkswagen group, Volkswagen AG), are going to Multimatic.  Cadillac are expected to stay with Dallara.  Not sure if other announcements have been made.  We wonder who will use Ligier and Oreca, the two French constructors.  Multimatic are from Canada.  Dallara are from Italy.  Those chassis are going to be the basis for not only LMDh but LMP2 next gen cars as well.  With GTE being dropped and GT3 coming, there will be a bigger gap, so the LMP2 cars can be slowed down.  Right now, in terms of speed and performance the LMP2 cars are in fact too close to the Hypercars.

The Gibson V8 has been a really successful motor, Gibson Technologies' 4.2 liter V8.  However, there will be a tender put forth for other companies to come in and build LMP2 spec motors.  The idea is that the new LMP2 engines will be less powerful in order to compensate for the Hypercars and we wonder about LMDh because those are said to have capacity for a petrol engine depending on the manufacturer and a hybrid system that is connected only to the rear wheels.  Both Dempsey Proton Porsche's are running well.  Both are racing in LM GTE Am.  Currently, Jaxon Evans, from New Zealand, is fifth in class in GTE Am.  He is sharing the #77 car with Christian Ried from Germany and Matt Campbell from Australia of course.

#88 is running 11th.  Lance Arnold, the German, is driving, alongside French born American Dominique Bastien and French Porsche contracted driver, Julien Andlauer.  Porsche and Team Penske will be ready to compete in LMDh.  They will be running for Porsche in both IMSA and the World Endurance Championship, and presumably the IMSA cars will be at Le Mans.  Porsche and Audi both want to run customer LMDh cars.  BMW and Lamborghini are anticipating coming in.  BMW could have a factory program and Lamborghini Squadra Corse, they want an all-customer program.  Robin Frijns brings the #31 Team WRT car into the pit lane, the current LMP2 leader.

The prototype field here at Le Mans in the next couple of years is going to be massive and there will be little room for GT's.  It seems like we are going back to what the height of the Group C era was in the early to mid 1980s here at Le Mans.  The only way the number of starters can be expanded is by adding three or four cars to the entry and that's it.  There's no more room.  We now see the #20 High Class Racing LMP2 car in the pit lane.  It is also likely that if GT3 rules are adopted, there will be one single GT class instead of splitting them up on driver ratings like the FIA World Endurance Championship does currently.  Mike Conway is told he will have a full-service pit stop coming.  

Corvette Racing want to have a full-on professional team and say GT3 is just not the place they want to invest in if they can't do it that way.  The ACO wants to have GT3 be an amateur class.  Jota are pitting in LMP2 from 16th place in the category, so they are a way down the overall running order right now.  Anthony Davidson is in the car, the Englishman, sharing with Roberto Gonzalez from Mexico and Antonio Felix Da Costa from Portugal.  IMSA will do with GT3 what WEC is doing with their GT classes currently, meaning that their GT3 cars (known as GT Daytona) will have a Pro and an Am class, or it will work out to GT Daytona Pro and GT Daytona.  This is a very complex jigsaw puzzle.  That's how sports car racing is, and well, yours truly is as on top of all of it as he possibly can be.

What do drivers eat during endurance events?  We have had this discussion before.  Slow-release food like carbohydrates can help.  Hydrating with liquids is the best way to stay in the zone.  Plan your diet around when you are in the car and get some sleep.  Let's take a lap at Le Mans.  From Mulsanne to Indianapolis is the fastest part of the circuit.  It is pitch black out there, but we can't continue the lap because there's problems for a GTE Pro car and it is a Porsche!  It is the #79 WeatherTech Porsche 911 RSR-19, Cooper MacNeil at the controls, sharing with Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor.

Cooper MacNeil has gone off in the same place we saw Oliver Milroy back into the fence earlier and we can see too, that even though he has recovered, the impact was hard enough that the blue medical light on the right side of the dashboard is flashing.  Fortunately, MacNeil can make his way back to the pits going right across to the lane from the Ford Chicane.  Thankfully he did not have too far to drive.  In replay, this could be a big one.  Let's see what happened.  The car swaps ends coming into the corner, whipping around, and... wallop!  He slams the wall on the rear left- hand corner and the impact were obviously big enough to trigger the medical light in the cockpit.  The car is OK and can be fixed.  That damage does not look too severe, but Coop will have to go to the medical center and get examined by the doctors to see he is OK and not hurt.

Earl Bamber or Laurens Vanthoor will be in the car.  Oh dear.  That corner is a mess on the right rear.  What a darn shame.  They were running top five in GTE-Pro.  Proton Competition run the car under team boss Giacomo Mattioli.  David and Cooper MacNeil bring the sponsorship as David MacNeil is the owner and operator of WeatherTech which makes automotive accessories and sponsors the IMSA WeatherTech Sports Car Championship of course.  David, being Cooper's dad.  So, Christian Ried owns the team and used to drive with his dad Gerold.  Cooper MacNeil, again, sharing with Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor.  So, now we see the leader is in and the #7 Toyota will have a driver change.  Mike Conway will hand the car over to Kamui Kobayashi for the next stint.

Cooper MacNeil is a very good driver and so are Laurens Vanthoor and Earl Bamber.  Presumably, Cooper will be OK but may be told by the driver, "sorry, you cannot drive in the race anymore", "pardon.  Vous ne pouvez plus conduire dans la course."  Big damage for the Porsche and they will have to work for a while to get that car back on the track.  Kevin Estre had a similar wreck on Thursday night with the factory car.  We saw the impact and if the suspension and the chassis pickup points are damaged, that will mean the chassis needs to be binned and cannot be rebuilt.  
Ferrari and Corvette continue their monumental scrap for the lead in GTE Pro.  It is between Alessandro Pier Guidi and Jordan Taylor.  The sister AF Corse Ferrari holds down third in class with Brazilian Daniel Serra at the wheel.  Daniel Serra's father Chico Serra raced Formula 2 and Formula 1 in the 1970s and '80s.  Pier Guidi has moved past Jordan Taylor.  We have forgotten Nick Mason and Holly Mason, father and daughter.  Nick Mason, the drummer for Pink Floyd, the great rock and roll band, he has driven sports cars both at a Pro Am and amateur level.  We have had a lot of father/son or dad and lad driver duos.  Kevin and Jan Magnussen in this race is an example.

It looks like the Corvette mechanics are running on fumes and getting a little zany.  Now, speaking of fumes, in England, all petrol should be containing biomass elements in the next month.  It goes from 5-10% in a little over a week.  Higher octane gas is at five percent but the price will increase.  The ACO also announced, from 2022 onward, Total, is set to have 100% renewable fuel for next year for the WEC and the European Le Mans Series, based on bioethanol made from of all things, are you ready for this?  Wine residue.  So, would you rather drink a cab sav or a chardonnay or a merlot, or put it in your car's petrol tank?

Why not.  It is from wine residue, not the wine itself.  Hopes are to reduce CO2 emissions by 65%.  The Porsche Super Cup one make championship uses a synthetic biofuel for racing that is produced from food waste.  Bentley recently took a Continental GT3 car to Pikes Peak and ran in the famed hill climb there, in Colorado, running the car on a synthetic fuel made from biomass.  Exxon Mobil are developing that and they also want to use algae of all things for synthetic fuel.  Volkswagen and Porsche are also looking at synthetic fuel for petrol powered motors.  This is interesting.  We wonder what hydrogen will do.  

The pit crews are getting ready.  Anyhow, the ACO and the FIA said in their Friday press conference.  Hold on.  Hold that thought.  We have an interview with Alex Lynn.  He says that driving out there at Le Mans is very busy.  Catching a GT car is hard when you are evaluating risk, and the team had damage to the car earlier on in the race.  United Autosport were running very well earlier but now, they just have to go for it, moving back towards the leaders and going for maximum attack with more than half the race left to run.  Lynn says that with less power and more weight, they lost only three seconds in qualifying trim.  He has a much faster and quicker car.  He is sharing the #23 United Autosport LMP2 car with Paul di Resta and Wayne Boyd, an all-British driver lineup.  Meanwhile, during the interview with Alex, we saw the RealTeam Racing LMP2 car pit from ninth in class, the #70 Oreca with Esteban Garcia from Switzerland, currently at the wheel.   

The #79 WeatherTech Porsche is in the garage and the pit crew is swarmed all over the car in a frantic effort to repair it.  Damage on the front and back ends of the car.  Once in the garage, everyone can work on it.  It is stripped down to the bare bones, but they'll know if it is salvageable or not.  They are examining the car.  Will it return?  Or is it game over?  The rule at Le Mans is that you have to complete 70% of the leader's distance, and if you don't, you are not classified, disqualified from the official results sheet at the end of the motor race.  We watch a replay of the accident with the WeatherTech Porsche.  Ouch!  That was a heavy lick even though the right rear corner was damaged for the most part.

We are now looking at the #92 factory Porsche, third in GTE Pro behind the Ferrari and the Corvette.  Alessandro Pier Guidi, Jordan Taylor, Michael Christensen, the top three in LM GTE Pro.  Alexander Sims was out for a long while doing a triple stint on tires.  So, the Michelin tires are in their sweet spot around Le Mans this evening.  So, now that the housekeeping is out of the way, we ought to see if there is more to speak of with Chris Parsons and company on the subject of... hydrogen.  For some years the ACO stated they'd have a class of cars exclusively focused on being fueled on hydrogen power.  Now, we see a car going off the road in one of the chicanes on the Mulsanne straight to interrupt this discussion on the hydrogen probability.

We'll return to that in a wee while, (the car off the road).  Back then, to hydrogen.  Because of the pandemic, we won't see a hydrogen powered car until 2025.  Currently, there is a working group of officials from the ACO in discussion with eight automakers about hydrogen fuel for race cars.  ACO hydrogen group manager Bernard Niclot says three companies will be ready to go with hydrogen powered prototypes to win the race overall.  These cars, whatever they end up as, will be powered by geeen hydrogen made from water as opposed to blue hydrogen made from the gas itself.  They have companies from Asia, Europe, and the United States, who are interested.  

Hyundai and Toyota have hydrogen powered automobiles on the market in Great Britain right now.  So, we shall wait and see where the hydrogen endurance race car saga goes.  Mr. Akio Toyoda, the founder, and CEO of Toyota motorcars in Japan, he recently competed in a 24-hour race in Japan driving a hydrogen powered Yaris compact car.  The hydrogen powered a standard petrol motor that was converted to use hydrogen.  JCB are making earth movers to run on hydrogen, (bulldozers, backhoes, steam shovels etc.)  Buses are also now being powered by hydrogen.  The British government says hydrogen will account for 1/4 of energy production and consumption in the next 30 years.  Meanwhile, the #63 Corvette C8.R has been in the pit lane for scheduled service.    

The hydrogen powered race cars we will see will be a part of Le Mans Hypercar and will not race within their own separate category.  The hydrogen prototype sports car will use a spec chassis that is being developed by Red Bull, yes, the same Red Bull that is not just the energy drink but also the Formula 1 constructor.  It is a cooperative effort between Red Bull and Oreca.  Each individual brand that wants to get involved will develop their own fuel cell technology.  So, that is where the hydrogen story stands at this point in time.

The #83 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE is in the pit lane.  We are soon to be at the end of the eleventh hour of this race.  Man, oh man.  Time flies when you are having fun!  This motor race has been a gas so far!  We know none of you folks are going to go to bed.  So, stay with us.  Michael Christensen might be the quieter of the Porsche factory drivers, but he is astonishingly quick, too.  Speak softly and carry a big, heavy foot.  Some drivers like being told they have faster cars coming up on them and they need to yield, while others don't appreciate it at all.  Faster traffic is important because at night you have no idea because all the headlights are the same.  The GT cars do not use yellow amber gels on the headlights anymore like they used to.  

Right now, Michael Christensen has the #52 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE right on his six, just 6/10ths of a second behind, coming in a hurry.  The team is telling him, "the Ferrari is on much fresher tires and he will breeze right by, so don't fight it, and don't slam the door on him.  Stick to the plan."  We saw that the #7 Toyota had a nasty brake lockup into Mulsanne corner and sometimes it can lock the brakes up when harvesting the energy back into the batteries from the motor and the brakes.  Let us now have a Captain Cook at the 2022 FIA WEC calendar so that we know when to follow the races next year.  The season will begin in March at Sebring with the 1,000 mile race that is a doubleheader with the IMSA WeatherTech Championship and the 12 Hours of Sebring.

The Prologue FIA WEC official test session will run at Sebring as well next year, a week or so before the race itself.  Holy smokes!  So the Prologue will be March 12th-13th 2022 with the 1,000 miles on March 18th and the 12 Hours of Sebring the next day on March 19th.  That is the first of half a dozen races.  Round two will be the traditional May date at Circuit de Spa Francorchamps in Belgium in the Ardennes pine forests, on May 7th.  Round three, is the classic.  We will be right back here at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, on June 12th and 13th, 2022.  That is when the crown jewel race is next year, so, mark your calendars ladies and gentlemen.  

July 10th at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza will be the Monza 6 Hours following Le Mans.  A hopeful return to Fuji Speedway in Fuji, Japan, will be on September 11th, and then, on November 12th, the season finale in Bahrain.  Hopefully this schedule I have just given to you works out with all of the ever shifting madness that is the global pandemic right now.  Alpine will pit soon.  Whoever their driver is now, we don't know exactly who, he is being told to box, either this lap or the next.  Also at the press conference yesterday, IMSA and the ACO signed a partnership agreement extension for another decade.

So, there will be influence overlap in the two championships for the next ten years and we shall see where that leads, hopefully, in a positive direction.  The Glickenhaus is in the pit lane and it looks to be the #708 car.  The manufacturers can invest in sports car racing, and we hope it works out because sometimes things don't work.  The trouble is that the ACO and IMSA are two different committees, so we don't know if the cars will be compatible.  It's like trying to have a horse and you end up designing a camel.  Sorry to be crude, but that's how it can work sometimes.  Let's try and be positive about it.  There will be a lot more cars, too, competing for a win.

However, we need to sort out class name confusion.  Let's just zip it on that deal.  Of course we have also talked about GT3 making a debut in the ACO rules racing in 2024 because these gorgeous GTE Pro cars from the factories are amazing but they are extremely expensive compared to a prototype if it is not a Hypercar.  LMP2 of course is capped for cost reasons, as we see the #36 Alpine in the pit lane now.  It is a fuel stop for #36.  Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Lamborghini and more, already race in GT3 in the SRO GT World Challenge.  Audi and Mercedes are going to pull out of the Formula Electric series.

BMW will have an LMDh car, too.  IMSA and the ACO want manufacturer involvement but don't want high costs and boatloads of money associated with getting them into the sport and keeping them here in the wonderful world of sports car racing.  It is an internecine battle in LMP2 at WRT as Yifei Ye is catching Charles Milesi hand over fist at a rate of knots.  There's 15 seconds or so between those two chaps.  Pit stop time for the second High Class Racing LMP2, the #49 car.  This is the one being shared by Jan and Kevin Magnussen (father and son), alongside Anders Fjordbach in that all Danish effort.
Jan Magnussen will take over the car for this stint.  Anders Fjordbach's dad, Soren, runs the team.  Also, into the pit lane, we have the #54 AF Corse Ferrari in LM GTE Am.  This is the regular season entry for Francseco Castellaci of Italy, his countryman and former Formula 1 driver Giancarlo Fisichella, and Switzerland's Thomas Flohr.  Ah.  Wow.  We have a purple sector from Sebastien Buemi, fastest of all in each sector of the track, in Toyota #8.  Not sure which segment of the track that is in, however.  Kevin Magnussen, Jan's son, is signed to race in the Peugeot Hypercar for next year and is currently running a Cadillac DPi with Ganassi Racing in IMSA as well.  
 


No comments:

Post a Comment