I understood that a team is only permitted to use one wheel gun per next season. Why would you want to slow a tire change down?

I would also have expected specific changes to the aero packages due to the six LMS aero-related incidents earlier this year.

“* Arrangements will be made to increase significantly the time needed for wheel changes.”

What does this possibly have to do with equalizing petrols and diesels and re-establishing the LMP1 vs LMP2 performance difference, especially in ALMS. Simply ridiculous. Let’s make things safer and allow the drivers to sort things out on the track, not getting their tires changed.

If anything, this will make the pits even less safe. Now we will see many cars in the pits at the same time, increasing the possibility of a collision or even worse, with a pit crewmember. All for no apparent reason. In my never humble oppinion, they should increase the number of air guns to 4 so that the crew do not have to spend time running to the next wheel. It adds nothing to the show and it is change for the sake of change.

Team Oreca Matmut was hit by a GT2 car in the 1,000 km of Monza. That didn’t help the “aero” incident.

The slowing down the wheel changes wouldn’t have anything to do with the ACO trying slow down the Audi stops to a Peugeot level would it ?. And possible take away a disadvantage of the long driver changes in a coupe design.

The “one-gun-rule” will result in longer pit stops for sure. But it could also ecourage the teams to run on more durable tyre compounds, in an effort to reduce the time wasted in the pits. Running four or five stints on the same set of tyres would reduce costs and make everybody happy (except maybe for the nice people at Michelin and Dunlop).

I think that Kurt makes a good point about the tire change rules. Not only would it reduce costs, but running on a harder compound tire will reduce cornering speeds as well. Hopefully that means that we will see less LMPs attempting to take flight.

Acura P1 coming next year. De Ferran motosports is supposed to be the team runing it. But at this pace Highcroft should be at the forefront as well.

The only thing is that in LeMans and international competition they might be known as Honda, since the Acura name is only used in the U.S Acura RL (US)=Honda Legend (everywhere else).

Acura won’t enter Le Mans unless they feel they will be competitive so that’s perhaps one of the reasons the ACO is curbing the Diesels.

I hope they don’t limit that Charouz Aston Martin. It will be a good challenger to Acura in P1.

And if Acura made a sports car, it would be a big deal. What are they selling, where are they attempting to place the racing halo? The RL?

Don’t get me wrong, those Acura/Courages are beautiful and make me wish I drove one every day. And there’s nothing mid-engined OR rear-drive about my Honda.

I believe the Acura brand is being launched in Europe in ‘09. Part of the plethora of reasons Acura wanted in on sports car racing.

Actually Acura is planning a new production NSX. Which happens to be mid engined and rear wheel drive, and high-revving too.

Since we’re on the subject: in 1995 the NSX was the GT2 winner at LeMans and in 96 they were 3rd. They got experience.

Fun stuff in other classes. Meanwhile my beloved Corvettes keep waiting for a worthy opponent in GT1.

Bamba, everything I’ve ever read or heard about an Acura sports car says FR V-10. But they haven’t got one yet, so they can’t sell it either.

They’re giving Porsche a run for their money in the ALMS, and if they can drive away GM and Toyota out of Indycar they must have some good racing knowledge. Remember the 80s when they gave Ferrari a good kick in the behind in F1.

Lets keep the Acura Honda chatter out of this thread, its concerning the ACO rules!

The one thing I find the most disturbing, is this sentense:

“* There will be a comparative investigation into the performance outputs of the petrol stock block engines and the petrol race block engines.”

I could fear that this is exactly to slow the Charouz Aston Martin car down. It was blistering fast out of the box, and I would not be surprised if that has raised some complaints from the other petrol LMP1 teams, like Pescarolo.

Sure, but given that Diesel prototypes will get a relative shunt in performance as well, the new rules will only create better parity - something the P1 class could use a little bit more of, in my opinion.

This tire change rule though - somebody said that it might force teams into running harder compounds, but that in turn will force them to turn to aerodynamics as a more significant proponent of traction, which I think would counteract the ACO’s safety-motivated intent to slow the cars down. Slowing the race down by forcing longer pit stops doesn’t really make sense to me.

If they want strategy to play a lesser role, this tire change limitation is going to have the opposite effect. Maybe they need to look into using the SuperGT mandatory pit stop window idea and even consider a milder application of FIA GT and SuperGT success ballast and parity regulations. But then again, if I wanted to watch a heavily regulated series, I’d just tune into F1.

I think, however some of these rules might not make their way into ALMS, which are the only ones I get… and wasn’t there something about regulation stability being good for the series? These ACO guys must get really bored sometimes.