F1 Dream Team
13th April 2015, 14:23
http://www.motorsportmagazine.com/race/sports-cars/wec-vs-f1/?
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What did you think of the race on Sunday? If you found it anything other than utterly spellbinding from flag to flag, it is possible you and I were tuned into different channels.
Actually I watched both the Chinese Grand Prix and the opening round of the World Endurance Championship at Silverstone and whether you tune in because you like to see close racing or variety in the sound, shape and technology of the competitors, the sports cars beat the open wheelers hollow.
History tells us endurance racing is a poor spectator sport because the cars have to be managed rather than thrashed to the finish, after a while it’s hard to tell who’s on which lap and that one team, be it Ford, Ferrari, Porsche or Audi, will be dominant and drone round to an unchallenged victory. And sometimes that’s the problem with history: it necessarily resides in the past.
From the archive
Porsche’s long road home
90 years of Le Mans
Audi aces reminisce
Some 201 laps were completed at Silverstone yesterday, and for 199 of them you’d have needed to be Nostradamus to predict the winner with any accuracy. Only when the Audi of Marcel Fässler emerged from a late stop/go penalty two laps from the end still clinging to his slender lead was it clear which way this race was going to go.
Even so, at the flag there were fewer than 5sec between the Audi and the second placed Porsche, with the lead Toyota less than 10sec further back, and without a single safety car period to artificially bunch up the pack.
That in itself would be grounds enough to suspect the WEC has its house in rather better order than F1 right now, but in fact it was only the start. Some of this has been said before, but it bears repeating: In F1 there is a rule book that is so proscriptive one frustrated engineer told me he’d left for the endurance racing world because “over 90 per cent of the car designs itself.” In the WEC there are cars with four, six and eight cylinders, normal aspiration and forced induction, diesel and petrol power and hybrid systems powered by flywheel, batteries and super capacitors.
And that’s just the difference between the Audis, Porsches and Toyotas. Now add in the other categories, not just the LMP2 cars but the GTE classes too, where thundering Astons, howling Porsches and shrieking Ferraris seem also to have arrived at remarkably similar levels of competitiveness. And yes, it is wonderful to see cars you actually recognise going around.
Share this:
What did you think of the race on Sunday? If you found it anything other than utterly spellbinding from flag to flag, it is possible you and I were tuned into different channels.
Actually I watched both the Chinese Grand Prix and the opening round of the World Endurance Championship at Silverstone and whether you tune in because you like to see close racing or variety in the sound, shape and technology of the competitors, the sports cars beat the open wheelers hollow.
History tells us endurance racing is a poor spectator sport because the cars have to be managed rather than thrashed to the finish, after a while it’s hard to tell who’s on which lap and that one team, be it Ford, Ferrari, Porsche or Audi, will be dominant and drone round to an unchallenged victory. And sometimes that’s the problem with history: it necessarily resides in the past.
From the archive
Porsche’s long road home
90 years of Le Mans
Audi aces reminisce
Some 201 laps were completed at Silverstone yesterday, and for 199 of them you’d have needed to be Nostradamus to predict the winner with any accuracy. Only when the Audi of Marcel Fässler emerged from a late stop/go penalty two laps from the end still clinging to his slender lead was it clear which way this race was going to go.
Even so, at the flag there were fewer than 5sec between the Audi and the second placed Porsche, with the lead Toyota less than 10sec further back, and without a single safety car period to artificially bunch up the pack.
That in itself would be grounds enough to suspect the WEC has its house in rather better order than F1 right now, but in fact it was only the start. Some of this has been said before, but it bears repeating: In F1 there is a rule book that is so proscriptive one frustrated engineer told me he’d left for the endurance racing world because “over 90 per cent of the car designs itself.” In the WEC there are cars with four, six and eight cylinders, normal aspiration and forced induction, diesel and petrol power and hybrid systems powered by flywheel, batteries and super capacitors.
And that’s just the difference between the Audis, Porsches and Toyotas. Now add in the other categories, not just the LMP2 cars but the GTE classes too, where thundering Astons, howling Porsches and shrieking Ferraris seem also to have arrived at remarkably similar levels of competitiveness. And yes, it is wonderful to see cars you actually recognise going around.