Amongst some other interesting things added on his site Mulsanne Mike jolted my thinking with these salient points - " Looking at their on track performance, in the race the Acuras appeared to be about 2 seconds off the absolute race speed of either the Audi or the Peugeot, take your pick. And while on a single lap, or a string of laps, the Acura can keep pace with the front runners (see qualifying), when traffic was brought into the equation the Acura suffered even more so not having back marker dusting uber-torque. Maintaining the car's momentum is paramount to laps times in this car. But in order to merely keep that pace, albeit slowly drifting through race length stints, the Acura drivers had to drive their hearts out and then some. The Acura makes up the power deficit to the diesels through higher cornering speed, which means higher G-loadings on the driver, lap after lap. We understand that the performance deficit to the diesels could be bridged by running even higher downforce levels or custom tires, but the car is currently at, or very near the upper levels of human performance. That is, chances are the drivers simply would not be able to corner the car at that speed for any given race length. This poses something of a quandary to the regulations makers. If a factory effort takes the page of the regulations that deals with gasoline powered LMPs, designs their car to those regulations, and yet finds itself in effectively the same position as anyone else would be in if they came to the table without a diesel ("knife to a gunfight" as one has described it even now in light of the changes the ACO has made to diesel regulations for this season), what then?" To which we add the thought, who takes the fight on this issue forward with the ACO now Henri Pescarolo has been brought into the diesel camp by Peugeot?
Henri is still running a petrol car too. Guess Acura needs to make a diesel version if they want to be competitive with the diesels. Carol
