WORLD CHAMPIONS

Yesterday AF Corse won its third consecutive World Title in the FIA WEC GTE Pro category, Bruni and Vilander became World Champions and Ferrari lead the Manufacturer's Championship with one race to go.

Since the inception of this FIA Championship, no other team other than AF has won the crown, no other manufacturer either (so fat...) and no other driver than Gimmi Bruni.

While we only read about F1, this is a true motor racing achievement. Yesterday, Bruni & Vilander beat the Aston Martin by 1,8 seconds after 6 hours of racing.....

The 458 GTE is King

 

An incredible accomplishment for AF Corse for sure.

Given the intense competition from Aston Martin, Porsche, an even bigger accomplishment given they are the defending champions. Did the church bells ring in Maranello?

Congratulations to Toyota as well for their outstanding season.

BHW

 

Congratulations to AF Corse and all their pilots.

It's a pity indeed that WEC doesn't have the visibility it deserves. I wonder if BOP is the main cause for this.

It would be nice to have an inside view of their work, synergies among different categories, their relationship with Ferrari, etc.


Regards
F

 

Anyone know if they're broadcasting Brazil in the US?

 

2014 Constructors Title: Ferrari

 

I was watching the race, and it was very exciting. I was very happy to see the AF Corse guys end up winning though the Astons always put up a great challenge. The 458's looked great out there.

 

IMHO, its super frustrating to watch BOP races, as there aren't enough of a particular to really set it in anyway fairly, a set of outstanding drivers will get a meh car squashed even further, and a set of average drivers will bias their car higher in performance. Its very frustrating, especially for a top driver, to watch another driver making mistakes, yet able to power away over and over.

At least with NASCAR, there are only 3 "cars", and 43 drivers, so anything done to equalize things is taking in a much larger pool of talent.

With F1, you get to see a team of engineers and drivers that get it right, dominate a season, which is quite exciting.

 

It's more to do with the manufacturers involved than anything.

The companies which commit to WEC P-1 for example Audi, Porsche, Toyota and now Nissan
are out to prove their technology (and more to the point their emerging hybrid systems) to be
superior to that of their competition in real world racing conditions.

In GTE, the manufactures Ferrari, Aston Martin and Porsche don't do exactly a lot of advertising
so their approach is to let their racing achievements do the talking for them, the PR naturally
follows (whether they choose to make big play of it or not is another issue).

They're not in the WEC for the same reasons manufactures like Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota are in
NASCAR (which is little more than a branding exercise as the technology there is virtually identical
between each of them) or Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari and Renault are in F-1.

The WEC is exactly what racing should be, a proving ground for future technology which will
filter down to the average family road car. The manufacturers which are on the leading edge of this
technology will have a huge leg up on their competition in the future.

While sports car racing outside of Le Mans has never caught the attention of a huge fan base,
it does offer the most diverse racing and the most relevant cars, it should be incumbent upon
the organizers of each series to educate the public but that's a whole other story.

BHW

 

great post.

I do think WEC could do a lot more to get the message out, particularly on the content side; hiding the competition behind a pay wall on the internet was a big mistake IMO.

 

The Prototypes are fantastic, but the sports cars are disconnected to watch. I look at it, and go "manufactured racing". Cars with no chance to compete against the others in their class some how win, even against better drivers. If you're going to have both, you need to keep them both relevant and exciting.

Either return sports cars to being more like their street counterparts, and if it can't hack it, it can't hack it, or make them all spec racers with different stickers. There is a disconnect on driver when it comes to the sports cars, if a car has better drivers, it will get its bop adjusted down based on its performance. This makes watching VERY frustrating, and wins don't hold much with me. My post was about the GT classes, rather than the prototypes.

 

What would make the WEC better would be for the FIA to mandate homogolation as they
used to so participating manufactures would have to produce X-amount of their cars to be
made available to privateers as they used to.

This would make the fields vastly more interesting and advance more drivers to the top
tier level.

More U.S. drivers would also help but that will be happening in 2015 with the involvement of
ESM and other teams defecting from USCC.

BHW

 

I agree, I'd have interest in the sports cars again with that format. The problem is cost containtment, a homologation special like a Maserati MC12, to some extent, a street legal prototype would be required to win. This defeats the purpose. Due to differing safety regulations of street and road vehichles, its also not really possible to do "stock car racing". (Which is what I'd really want to see).

I would have far more interest if either the road cars and race cars matched each other closer, or they all went to a spec frame/engine and threw on different stickers NASCAR style. Trying to straddle the fence, and having tube frame replica body of 4 bangers with non production V8 engine just doesn't go with me. I *cannot* watch a mazda RX8 going toe to toe with a Aston, Ferrari, or Porsche, when in stock form, it'd get smoked. (Same goes for the silly V8 powered Z4).

I only follow the prototype class.