The works Porsche team didn´t race at Le Mans in 1984 because they weren´t happy with the ACO rules (typical Porsche) and in 1985 suffered some problems: **** happens. In 1996 and 1997 the works GT1s were a lot faster than Joest´s LMP, but again **** happened. Bellof did most of the 84 season with the works team, racing with Brun in only some races, I can´t remember why. The customer Audis won when Audi decided that it was not worth to enter the Joest "works" cars to race those poor bastards of Dome and teams like that. It´s rare that a customer beats the works team. The cars may be similar, but the team, the budget and the drivers aren´t the same. Sometimes enough **** happens to the works team to get beaten by a customer, like when the cloned Mercedes of Racing Point beat the original Mercedes of Mercedes, but it´s the exception that proves the rule..
The company that builds these rocket motors has a motorsport division that sells heat exchangers, etc. to the racing community. I believe the F1 rules don’t allow exclusive contracts so any other team should have access—if they don’t already—to this technology.
There was a tweak to the engine rules in 2018 to stop that : https://www.racefans.net/2018/02/23/fia-tweaks-rules-to-make-engine-customers-more-competitive/
Also famously, a private 250LM entered by the NART (Gregory-Rindt) won the 1965 Le Mans race when all the factory Ferraris failed. One of the most famous customer victory, and the last one in the Sarthe for the Prancing Horse.
Teams can still chose to run different software, though I think that'd be crazy to do so. But even if they ran the same software and fuel, I suspect it's still up to each team to tune the car and deployment strategies. I don't know if you have ever tuned an engine, but if 2 guys had the same engine with the same Holley software, we could have dramatically different performances because of the tune, even though we have all the same features. But as I said earlier, I doubt there is much of a difference between factory engines and customer engines now. No hidden modes now, according to the rules.
Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Just had to throw this in here for fun. Patrese did drive some crazy looking cars. Last day of testing tomorrow- we will get more of a look on the pecking order.
Differential failure. This had been a worry during the last few hours. I was at that race, my 3rd Le Mans. The Ford v. Ferrari duel was very exiting: a race of attrition. I didn't sleep at all, I remember enjoying the Ford dropping out one after the other like the previous year, but then it was the Ferraris !
And his teammate at Brabham in that ill-fated (especially and sadly for him) BT-55 also drove this funky beauty, though he never raced it! A prize (not really, LOL) for who can identify the track: Image Unavailable, Please Login
Mercedes indeed like to play PR games, and hide their speed during testing, and Lewis likes to play the wounded animal in interviews, so you take what they say with a huge grain of salt these days. However ... That Mercedes looks like a handful, even more so with the new sidepods. Constant oversteering, lock ups, and very violent porpoising. The drivers seem unable to go flat out and aggressive. They're not enjoying themselves out there. That can't be something the engineers want to see in those runs. The new side pods seemed to make the problem worse. It seemed to me that Mercedes were just throwing setups hoping one would solve the problem, and if anything, the car is handling worse. I could absolutely be wrong, or Mercedes could resolve their problems before race day. But personally, I think the problems are more serious at Mercedes than even meets the eye, and the drivers are trying to not show that publicly.
Any idea why our customer teams, Haas and Alpha Romeo are not clocking higher laps/long runs? The Mercedes works and customer teams have a respectable lap count proving the efficiency and durability of the new engine.
Well I think Haas has had its hands full the last few weeks. And Alfa is always a mess, so that's nothing new. You could give them the Mercedes engine and they'd still be at the bottom of the well.
Yeah... sad to see Ferrari doing all the hard work. Had the others sorted out their issues we could have used some of the time to carry out different tests to check engine under 100% power or something different to help better understand the car and the engine.
