Le Mans: battle of the LMP1 privateers
The only factory team left in LMP1 starts this weekend’s Le Mans as hot favourite. But what are the chances of the smaller teams stealing honours should the TS050S stumble?
t looks like the race for third place or best of the rest behind the Toyotas – call it what you will. Only it’s not, because this is the Le Mans 24 Hours. Strange things happen and, history relates, even stranger things happen to Toyotas. The battle among the new wave of LMP1 privateers to arrive in the World Endurance Championship is to be in pole position behind the Japanese cars should they cough or splutter this weekend. The five independent teams running nonhybrid P1 machinery in the WEC this year are first and foremost racing among themselves for the final spot on the podium. But there is the hope – perhaps even expectation – that they could find themselves a step or perhaps even two higher should the Toyota TS050 HYBRIDS run into problems. But that’s presuming that a privateer can have a clean race unfettered by technical issues. That in itself is a big ask given that three of the four cars on the grid are new, with only one race in the Spa WEC opener behind them. Or in the case of the Ginetta, no races. The best of the privateers edged closer to the Toyota TS050 in the official test day at Le Mans, certainly closer than it had been at Spa. That car, the fastest of the Rebelliongibson R-13s, was only 0.6 seconds down. As slight as it may sound around a circuit measuring eight and a half miles, that’s probably too much for Rebellion Racing to be able to
“As soon as Toyota stops for more than one lap, then we have a chance” REBELLION RACING’S NEEL JANI
take the fight to the lone manufacturer remaining in LMP1.
But it did confirm Rebellion’s status as favourite in the battle to be top privateer. Team boss Bart Hayden admits that.
“We have to make ourselves favourites to be best of the rest because of our alignment with ORECA and Gibson,” he says. “And we have to make ourselves favourites to put pressure on ourselves.”
That in itself is remarkable given the amazingly short gestation period of the R-13. It wasn’t signed off until the back end of last year and didn’t run for the first time until the week of the official WEC pre-season test at Paul Ricard at the start of April. Yet it was on the privateer pace at the so-called prologue and the two cars, one straight out of the box, finished third and fourth on the road behind the dominant Toyotas at Spa.
Rebellion’s form is testament to the experience of the team and its partners. It was the top operation in the privateer ranks of the WEC in 2012-16 before its title-winning foray in LMP2 last year, and ORECA and Gibson have a wealth of sportscar experience going back the better part of 20 years.
“We only had two and a half days of testing before Spa, but what ORECA and Gibson bring to the table are known factors,” says former WEC champion Neel Jani, who’s back at the team with which he made his name in sportscar racing before signing for Porsche. “That paid out at Spa.”
SMP Racing, with its BR Engineering chassis designed and built by Dallara, was the other privateer that Toyota singled out when it suggested in the wake of the test day that the opposition was edging closer. The Aer-engined BR1 chassis was the first of the newcomers to hit the track last autumn and racked up significant mileage over the winter, just edging out Rebellion as fastest privateer at the prologue.
But the team hit a major setback at Spa when Matevos Isaakyan flipped at Eau Rouge at the start of the final hour. The Russian driver was uninjured and the monocoque repairable, but Dallara was forced to make aerodynamic revisions to the car to prevent a repetition. Those changes have blunted the performance of the car at Le Mans courtesy of more drag and downforce.
The SMP squad, which is run by Le Mans debutant ART Grand Prix, is going into the 24 Hours with “humble hopes”, according to technical director Gaetan Jego.
“When we finished at Spa, it was the first time the car had run for that long,” he says. “Finishing the race is our goal. We also have to concede that it is our first time as a team at Le Mans, which means we are missing some of the detailed knowledge of our rivals.”
THE REST
The Bykolles team is the only P1 entrant continuing in the privateer ranks from last year, and its decision to drop out of the WEC after the Nurburgring last July to focus on testing and development appears to have paid dividends. The team’s solo ENSO Clm-nissan P1/01 ran reliably to what turned into fourth place at Spa, albeit
three laps down on the Rebellion that was classified third.
Traffic prevented the P1/01 showing its true potential at the test day, but the team concedes that the 3m19s lap posted by the best of the Rebellions is well out of range. It does, however, have a growing confidence over the car’s reliability.
“We ran six hours at Spa without any problems,” says driver Oliver Webb. “We are happy with our reliability and haven’t had any major issues in the lead-up to the race. If we can do 3m21s for 24 hours, I’m confident that we’ve got a chance of being third.”
There isn’t much confidence in the camp at the Manor Ginetta team that runs under the CEFC TRSM Racing banner. It’s looking beyond this weekend’s race for its pair of Mecachrome-engined G60-LT-P1S after enduring a torrid build-up to the race resulting from cashflow problems, which prevented it from racing at
Spa. The car has only tested in anger on three occasions and, without its definitive Le Mans aerodynamics, wasn’t anywhere near the pace at the test day.
“We’ve got to be realistic with a car that has so little mileage on it and just target a finish,” says Manor sporting director Graeme Lowdon. “We’re looking at Le Mans as the first step in a long-term project.”
The Dragonspeed squad has also been up against it in the lead-up to Le Mans. It received its customer BR1, powered by the Gibson
V8, only a week before the prologue and then had to rebuild it around a new monocoque after Pietro Fittipaldi, standing in for Renger van der Zande, crashed at Eau Rouge in qualifying at Spa.
Dragonspeed’s aspirations are different from those of the other privateers. Henrik Hedman, who drives and funds the programme, is a true amateur who’s out racing in the premier class at Le Mans just for the hell of it.
THE PRIVATEERS’ CHANCES
Toyota has been given three key advantages over the privateers – or rather not had them taken away. The TS050 HYBRIDS will be faster on track, pit fewer times and spend less time stationary when they are in the pits.
They add up to a significant margin after 24 hours in favour of Toyota should it replicate the pace advantage it had over Rebellion at the test day. Presuming they both had trouble-free races, Japanese cars would be somewhere between two and three laps in front.
An advantage of six tenths each time over the 300-plus laps that are likely to be run under full green-flag conditions makes for a deficit of just over three minutes. So that’s one lap, give or take.
The Toyotas will be going a lap longer between fuel stops – 11 rather than the 10 of the privateers – so that means they are likely to stop three or four times fewer over the course of the 24 hours. A stop, including the slowing-down and speeding-up parts, should cost a car just under a minute now that refuelling and tyre changes can take place at the same time. So that’s around about another lap.
Each time the Toyota stops it will gain approximately five seconds on the privateer cars in the time it takes for a stint’s worth of fuel to go into the car. Multiply that by 30-something stops, and you get another lap.
All that is a simplistic explanation of what could happen presuming a Toyota and a Rebellion have perfect races and can hit something approaching their ultimate lap time every time around the Circuit de la Sarthe. That doesn’t happen, but it’s more likely to happen for a hybrid TS050 than for a non-hybrid Rebellion-gibson.
The boost from the Toyota’s energy-retrieval systems gives it a key advantage in traffic. The drivers of the TS050 can use a bit of electric energy to get past a slower car at key points of the circuit to avoid losing time.
Jani reckons that the six-tenths margin is just close enough for Rebellion to be able to profit from a Toyota hiccup. “It’s not like before when they would have had to be in the pits for more than half an hour,” he says. “As soon as they stop for more than one lap, that’s realistically when we have a chance.”
Hayden said he was “encouraged rather than hopeful” after Rebellion’s test-day performance. He knows a victory for his team, or any privateer, is a long shot. “All the stars would need to align for that to happen,” he says, “or rather Toyota’s stars to unalign.”