18-06-2016: FIAWEC 24 Hours of Le Mans [Pro classes]

A month has passed since this race. Everybody who has had them has posted their thoughts on it, which have by and large been about the heartbreak of the leading #5 Toyota. But since then, the emotion has waned. The post race depression has come and gone, another 24 hour race has taken place, as has the SRO's first endurance race of the year (I refuse to acknowledge three hour races as endurance races). I will now throw a lot of numbers onto this page and semi-relevant thoughts in light of these facts.

LMP1:

On pace, the LMP1 hybrid teams were very close. Less than three-quarters of a second separated the five fastest prototypes using my version of the 20% average (the #7 Audi that suffered a turbo failure and then a number of other niggles being the anomaly). The fastest of them all was the #1 Porsche that led early on before a water cooler failed. Notable, the #2 Porsche was, on average, 0.3 seconds/lap faster than the #5 Toyota, but spent a minute and forty seconds longer in the pits as its longer fuel stints allowed it to make two fewer pit stops.

A few years ago, Neel Jani drove Rebellion Racing, which has not lost an LMP1 privateer championship that it fully competed in since 2010.  During the 2013 Silverstone round, wacky conditions allowed Jani and Nick Heidfeld to qualify the Rebellion Lola fourth ahead of the #1 Audi. Jani started the race and nearly took third from Allan McNish on the opening lap before he finally gave up his fourth place on lap four. Later that year, he came less than a tenth away from putting the Rebellion ahead of the #7 Toyota in Le Mans qualifying. I have no proof that I’ve been hailing Jani as even with the very top of LMP1 drivers and as more than a qualifying specialist, but I have vindication nonetheless; Jani was the fastest at Le Mans by 20% average times (3:23.229).

The nature of how close the top class is leads to some fairly high standards by us speculators. The five fastest drivers overall in the race were Porsche drivers. Romain Dumas was the odd one out. He averaged a 3:24.173. That is only 0.9 seconds off the very fastest average, but fifth place Marc Lieb average a 3:23.448. It is perhaps telling that Dumas only ran 103 laps, his final stint being nixed in favour of Jani and Lieb rotating. It may also not be telling; he was the fastest of the #2’s drivers at Silverstone.

The LMP1 privateers were, as expected, ridiculously far off the pace. On top of being six seconds a lap slower, the AER unreliability ensured that the #13 would not come close to any kind of success. Dominik Kraihamer was the fastest of the Rebellion drivers (3:29.894) followed by Nick Heidfeld (3:29.006) and Alexandre Imperatori (3:29.475). As for Bykolles, I wrote before that I was rather concerned that their fastest driver was the one not at Le Mans. Pierre Kaffer turned out to be the slowest of the three, 1.3 seconds/lap off Oliver Webb. The great embarrassment is that Kaffer was slower than six LMP2 drivers. Kaffer is not a poor driver, but the lack of race running in a car as lacklustre as the CLM P1/01 was just a bit unfortunate.

LMGTE Pro:

If you want an article on GTE BoP, you can find one. I wrote before that I tend to write about problems without having the premise of a solution, but everybody has done that about GTE BoP. Unless I discover I am the sole provider of sports car knowledge for a lot more people than I currently have reason to believe, I am not going to touch such things.

I will, however, talk about the drivers a little bit. I have written in my last two posts that Billy Johnson is the weakest link in the Ford camp. Then he set the fastest lap of the race for GTE Pro. Scott Dixon snatched it at the end, but that is not going to make it significantly easier to explain why I think I’m still right at this point in time. Much of it has to do with Ford’s strategy.

All four Fords ran very steadily through the race. There was some clear if narrow disparity in either driver talent or grip available to the car through every stint, but the plan seemed to be to run high 3:54s to low 3:56s for a triple stint on the tyres. Some drivers struggled more with the tyres and had to double stint. Sébastien Bourdais, for example, ran a fuel stint that was much faster than anybody else, but he could only double stint that set of tyres. The only driver who failed to complete a single triple stint was Billy Johnson. His first two stints in the car were double-stints, both elements of which were over a second slower than both of his #66 teammates (Olivier Pla and Stefan Mücke).

Then something happened for the last quarter of the race or so: all of the Fords picked up roughly two seconds per laps. Billy Johnson’s third time in the car was something of a qualifying stint. He set what was the fastest lap of the race at the time (3:51.582), but killed the tyres in the process; the average time for the fuel stint (3:53.482) was slower than Mücke’s previous middle stint (3:53.465) despite the sparkling fast lap. His second stint was mediocre at best, but it wasn’t off the pace. Pla was next in the car and while his fastest lap was a tenth off Johnson’s, the average time for the stint was a half-second per lap quicker (3:52.902).

Billy Johnson is not a poor driver, but he has yet to prove he is a world class driver. Maybe he will at the Nürburgring. It is evident that the “Team UK” squad that competes in the pinnacle of sports car motor racing is the B-Team.  Stefan Mücke was perhaps the only established GT star on the squad and while Olivier Pla and Harry Tincknell have adapted to the Ford impressively, Andy Priaulx and Marino Franchitti have not.  It’s possible that they are using advanced tactics beyond my comprehension, but without added car speed, they cannot compete like this against AF Corse (even as Johnson departs for the remainder of the season).

Of the Ferrari drivers, James Calado was again fastest, followed closely by Alessandro Pier Guidi. Until I started tracking GTE performances, the only real impression I had of Pier Guidi was him setting two straight poles at the Spa 24 Hours and spinning out of the lead both times, which of course led me to the assumption that he was a qualifying specialist. Turns out that when he isn’t spinning out of the lead at the Spa 24 Hours, he’s a top flight driver. Giancarlo Fisichella was the fastest out of the Risi team. I expected a little more out of Vilander and Malucelli, but neither were that far off and given the reception Malucelli’s announcement got, I think he still exceeded virtually everybody else’s.

Porsche had a bad day. Two of their cars were gone by lap 140, but they were never going to make an impact anyway. The fastest 20% average of the Dempsey-Proton team was set by Michael Christensen and was 1.2 seconds/lap off the pace of the slowest of the factory Porsche drivers. This was almost certainly by design. Both Richard Lietz and Philipp Eng were within 0.4 seconds and the #77 finished the race.

For Aston Martin, the most notable thing about their drivers’ pace is that Nicki Thiim was the fastest of them and it was not even close. His fastest full fuel stint was 0.9 seconds/lap quicker than the next fastest and his 20% average nearly 0.8 seconds/lap faster than the second fastest (both second best times by Marco Sørensen). The other outlier was Jonny Adam, who was over 0.8 seconds/lap slower than any of the other AMR drivers. He has since been reassigned to focus more on his customer GT3 efforts. Fernando Rees was much closer on pace; but he has also been booted. I started to write about how little I understood it, but if the plan was simply to reduce each car to two drivers, they had to get rid of somebody and there hasn’t really been anybody significantly slower.

There is not much to comment on for Corvette since they are not sticking around in Europe, but the Taylor brothers were embarrassingly slow. Antonio Garcia was the quickest of the Corvette drivers (3:54.829). Jan Magnussen was fourth fastest (3:56.244). That difference is enough to concern me somewhat, although Magnussen does have other examples of being quick at Le Mans. Jordon Taylor’s average was 3:57.452 and Ricky’s a 3:57.552. Again, it’s possible that these are simply advanced anti-BOP tactics to have two of your six drivers nearly get beaten by Águas in last year’s Ferrari, but I don’t get them.

As an aside, I wrote this bit in a comment on Paul Truswell’s blog, but I’ll repost it here since I don’t get original thoughts very often.

Then again, it’s long and the whole reason I suddenly decided to split this race up into two posts was how long it was getting to be. Have a link to the article instead. You can find the comment if you want it.

LMP2 and LMGTE Am will show up shortly, and then the last ELMS race sometime before the next one.