Sportscar Engineering

Post Prologue Notebook Now the pre-season prologue is over we can take a class by class look at how the new entrants compare to more tested machinery. LMP1   The class with the most change from last season is the LMP1 class with the loss of Porsche resulting in 7 new non-hybrid entrants.   Toyota ran outside of EoT spec to stress their cooling system, so their time gaps are not representative, but the non-hybrids all are. Times and top speeds for all LMP1 entrants at the Prologue Toyota: The Toyotas ran the fastest around the lap, and also through speed traps, but it is unknown how much of this speed is down to running outside of the regulations. Due to running out of the regulations, it is not known how much lift and coast was done, as this skewed the Le Mans top speed data. What can be commented on however is the massive lap total made by the #7 car. Toyota’s main adversary at Le Mans has been their own reliability, but with 98% of a LM24 distance...

Porsche took the covers off their modified 919 Hybrid this week, starting an assault on track records around the globe. This first public outing allows us to take a closer look at the modifications, which have been effective, with its lap times 12 seconds faster than the fastest LMP1 times for the 6 Hours of Spa qualifying last year! The fastest time of the day (1:41.770) broke the previous record (1:42.553) set by Lewis Hamilton during qualifying of the 2017 Belgian Grand Prix. We can expect the record to be broken by F1 teams this year, depending on conditions, but if this 919 Evo gets another run we understand Porsche have targeted to achieve a time of 1:36! Now lets take a look at the changes:  The most obvious modifications are the exterior, with a modified bodykit consisting of new front and rear sections.   For the front end, the new design resembles the 919's low drag nose, with elongated wheel pods extending forwards in front of the wheels; but th...