Alpine hits BOP slope after its Sebring success
Alpine’s grandfathered LMP1 car has been pegged back for this weekend’s World Endurance Championship round at Spa after its victory in March at the Sebring 1000 Miles. The Gibson-engined A480 will run with a reduction of 20kw (26bhp) from the series opener.
The revised Balance of Performance for the ORECA design, which started life as the Rebellion R-13, comes after it largely dominated round one of the championship with Nicolas Lapierre, Matthieu Vaxiviere and Andre Negrao. The car was approximately a second clear of the Toyota and Glickenhaus Le Mans Hypercars during the race at the Sebring International Raceway.
Toyota drew back from criticism of the BOP for Sebring, but suggested that the system used by the rulemakers – the FIA and the Automotible Club de l’ouest – may not have correctly modelled the unique nature of the American airfield circuit.
The revised power output for the Alpine is the only change to the BOP in the Hypercar class for the Spa 6 Hours on Saturday. That means that the minimum deployment speed of the Toyota GR010 HYBRID’S front-axle energy retrieval system is again 190km/h (118mph), which is an increase on the 120km/h and 150km/h in the dry and wet respectively allowed last year when this figure was part of the technical regulations rather than the BOP.
Toyota team principal and driver Kamui Kobayashi is confident that the Japanese manufacturer will be more competitive than at the 2022 WEC opener.
“We expect to be fighting at the front and everyone is fully committed to get our first win of the season,” said the Japanese, who failed to score points at Sebring after Jose Maria Lopez crashed the car they share with Mike Conway out of the race. Since Sebring, which was a disappointing result for us, the whole team has pushed hard to improve by working together with the drivers, particularly at our test in Portimao earlier this month.
“We worked on some things for Spa as well, which should suit our car better than Sebring, where the bumps had a big impact on car balance and performance.”