Le Mans Series
Racing Box confirms strong driver line-up
After announcing it would enter two Lola B08/80s in the 2009 Le Mans Series season Racing Box started negotiations with drivers and engine manufactures to complete its package for the upcoming season. This week the Italian squad was able to confirm its drivers as well as the engine supplier.
Almost a month and a half ago Filippo Francioni, Andrea Ceccato and Ferdinando Geri were confirmed for one of the two cars and in recent weeks the names of Matteo Bobbi, Andrea Piccini and Mike Hezemans surfaced on the internet as well as magazines. Luca Canni Ferrari and Ferdinando Geri confirmed the three experienced drivers would indeed join the team for the 2009 season. The first line-up will also change with Giacomo Piccini taking the place of Geri.
They also announced that the two racing cars will be powered by Judd engines next year. This season the Judd DB 90ยบ V8 engines were already used in the Lola B08/80 of the Speedy Racing-Team Sebah engine and that car was able to battle with the dominating Porsches.
Racing Box will conduct some private tests in February before taking the cars to the Paul Ricard High Tech Test Track for the official Le Mans Series pre-season test days on March 8th and 9th.
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In the European Lemans Series the racing in the Prototype classes are better than the Americanlemans Series. But Lola is selling the prototypes left and right.
it’s true, the LMS has more variety and a larger grid.
But it’s a matter of quantity vs quality. Any of the top runners in the ALMS (Acuras and Porsches) would easily win the LMS championship in P2 and P1.
The only teams in the LMS they would struggle with are the diesels, and those are P1 machines.
Seen the P1 Zytek’s times at Petit LeMAns? Those are the times a pescarolo or a courage-oreca would run, well off the pace of the P2 top runners in the ALMS
Don’t forget, though, that the ALMS LMP2 cars don’t run to the same restrictions as the LMS LMP2 cars and so can run near or at the pace of LMP1, which was (I guess) a move by the ALMS people to give Audi some competition…
After LeMans in 2007 the ALMS P2s ran the same restrictors as anyone in the LMS. They just have more money to develop other components of the car: the transmission, suspension, aerodynamics, engine…etc.
They also have the cash to fit their cars with brand new components for every single race.
The only thing they had over the LMS is that they were allowed to have a 90 liter fuel tank, while the P2 teams in the LMS had 80.
@bamba,
You’re missing the fact that in the ALMS,the Porsche RS Spyders are allowed to rev their engines quite a lot higher then over here in the LMS,hence run significantly more top end power.
And let my tell you,during Le Mans this year,the RS Spyder of the van Merksteijn team had just as intensive factorybacking as the Spyders in the ALMS get…