OMG, I am soooooooo pissed Aaudi din’t get its first 2011 win for its Audi R18. Theyt had the pace but a ton of bad luck! :-( They better get their act together and their electrical issues…. They clearly had the pace, so lets see if they can get it perfect at 2011 Le Mans with an all Audi R18 1-2-3 qualifying results followed with a 1-2-3 all Audi R18 race results! :-)

Brilliant event, full of drama throughout. In spite of all predictions France 2 Germany 0. Lovely circuit in superb weather, wish I could have gone, but congratulations to Eurosport for excellent coverage. The beauty of endurance racing is the stunning machinery and complete un-predictability of events right up to the end, eg the suspension failure on the 3rd Pug. It seems that F1 have taken note, and it has moved away from being the most expensive yawn on the planet. John R.

I did have the fortune to whitness this fantastic race and we had a great day. What a race and what a nice little slap in the face for Audi. The Pugs even sounded allmost like a racecar!

The question is how full were bags of sand inside those pretty new diesel coupes..?

We too were at Spa. Great race, beautiful cars, superb weather for the Ardennes in May, but no obvious evidence of sand bagging. The Pugs seemed to have more grunt coming out of the slower corners which gave them a visible advantage on the straighter bits: for e.g. they could catch and out drag the Audis on the start / finish straight.

Pug suspension damage due to contact ? Audis still new with more to come ? 6 hour trial not a 24 hour race ? We’ll see in June, but the Pugs sounded like racing cars and seemed able to make better use of torque coming out of the slower corners. Can’t wait for the great race.

The Ferrari 458 seems to have moved GT on a step, It looks like a purpose designed racing car and moved through traffic with ease. The Porsches, Astons and Corvette looked big and unwieldy by comparison. The 430s never looked quite right somehow and the BMWs [beautiful as they are] now look huge. The Lotus was very new but also looked every bit the GT racer. Jet Alliance is a professional team, perhaps a challenger to the 458 ?

Further comment on great event, a pity the ACO still have their sums wrong, how much better it would be if Henri and friends were in with a real chance. John R.

@ John R – quite right – the gap between diesel and petrol was wider than ever at Spa. Pescarolo, Rebellion and Zytec P1′s are grand fathered in and further limited as a result. The AMR One is too new to be judged yet – good luck to Prodrive – perhaps a better showing in June ?

The resource and research capacity of Audi and Pug is huge and full marks for developing diesel tecnology as they have, but AM is a low volume petrol engined GT manufacturer. The ACO has to find a more informed approach to equivalency or there may be no AMR, no new Pescarolo, and no new anything else in P1 in 2012.

I was really rooting for level 5 in P2 especially now with the bigger restrictor.

I think scott tucker should have gone with his fastest drivers (luiz diaz and ryan hunter-reay), he went with experience. I suppose he chose bouchut and barbosa because they know spa and are used to european style endurance racing. But apparently it didn’t help, since the team had no setup data for spa to properly setup the car. The car was slow and it forced Bouchut to overdrive.

To cure that problem you simply need pure raw pace to outgun the competition. Luiz and Ryan would have been perfect.

Jetalliance and their lotus are a long way from challenging the 458, as good as they might look. Porsche, BMW and corvette are still the closest competition to ferrari.

The ferraris are helped by their numbers, they won’t fight each other as hard.

I still refuse to think the ACO has anything to do with the diesel dominance at this point. The Acura P1 would have kept race pace with the diesels here.

The other cars are simply unrefined in their development.

Last year strakka and RML both had the Honda engines. But strakka also had the honda chassis and RML the lola chassis. Lola is as good as any privateer chassis out there (in some cases the best). Yet we all saw how much different their performances were, simply because of air dynamics.

So my point is that all the privateer chassis are just less aerodynamically advanced. They’re less stable at high speed, have to brake earlier into corners, cant go as fast around fast corners, etc.

@XJ8 and @Bamba:
Yes, I really think we should stop discussing about the balance between diesels and petrol engines, as long as there is no well-funded and really professional team comparable to Audi and Peugeot, which runs petrol engine cars. If it is possible for Pescarolo to be the best petrol-powered car with a basically 3 year old car and poor sponsoring, this tells a lot about the quality of the rest of the petrol powered LMP1 field.
I also appreciate the JetAlliance Lotus activities, but the team can’t be compared with the efforts of the works teams AF Corse or Schnitzer.
And @Bamba:
I think Bouchut is a very good choice for Spa – especially when the team has never been in Spa before, they should have someone to help them with a fairly good setup. And it is absolutely not funny to come to Spa as a driver for the first time and having to drive a poor-balanced car, unless you like Eau Rouge high speed accidents like Jacques Villeneuve did….

Bouchut is always a good choice, given his experience. So is Barbosa.

But their experience only helps when there’s a team of engineers who can make use of it. The team has no basic setup data for the car on this track. And I’m pretty sure no one in the paddock would share information with them because it would be like giving a giant the stick he will use to beat you with.

I’m no race car driver but I think the car has to have a basic setup before the drivers can fine tune it to the track’s conditions and to their liking.

So in the absence of all that the best thing is to go full speed with the guys who are still in the prime of their careers. Hunter Reay and Diaz would be equal on speed with any driver on the grid.

Surely a significant part the problem is that no matter how the private P1 teams are funded or the cars designed and driven, a good petrol engine produces less power and less torque than a good diesel engine ? Diesel fuel is denser and the ignition process more efficient so more energy is produced by volume than with petrol.

The ACO has clearly attempted to equalise the position. There is no suggestion of the ACO pandering to the investment of Pug or Audi, but unless further, more effective measures are taken the concern is that no well funded/designed petrol engined team will be able to raise the investment to engage in future.

Perhaps the AMR One will come good ? Perhaps Pescarolo, Rebellion, etc will find the resource to build or buy 2012 cars ? But unless the differential between diesel and petrol is addressed further what will be the business case for investment, and what hope of collaboration wih a manufacturer on engine supply or design unless they too go down the diesel route ?

I agree it is difficult to compare the performance of good private teams with good manufacturer teams and no doubt some team principals over state the petrol case, but the ACO is the most important regulator of sports car racing in the world and I hope it continues to look at the question.

No idea how the Highcroft HPD will compare but best of luck to them, it’s a great looking team and car.

Happy to report that the AFC and JMW 458′s fought it out tooth and nail for the first three hours at Spa – great to watch before JMW hit problems.

Okay, let me just get one thing straight…

Are LMP1 cars allowed to use a GT-E/GT2 engine, since the (engine) rules are essentially the same as last years LMP2 rules which, unless I’m much mistaken, allowed GT2 engines.

And if so, I don’t see why Aston Martin didn’t just use the engine from the reasonably successful Vantage.

Quite agree with XJ8 comments on equivalence between petrol/ diesel. For some years now the petrol motors have not even been close, so the ACO have got sums consistently wrong. I do not buy the lack of development argument, F1 has been petrol for ever, there must be plenty of engineers out there who could design a competitive unit if the parameters were right. At present the petrol motors are choked out of the game. This could be rectified at the stroke of a pen, which would really improve the sport, or possibly other influences are at work which will never let this happen. John R.

It could be so easy…
Why isn’t it possible that ACO and FIA agree on simple engine regulations, like a 4 litre V8 for LMP1 and a 1.6 litre V6 Turbo for LMP2, both based on series production engine blocks and both petrol-powered, maybe with an option for hybrids with downgraded petrol engines? If you allow so many different engine concepts and then try to equalize them with air restrictors or somehow else, you will always be in trouble with many discussions, as we can see here.
Just simplify everything, it will pay off!

Guys it’s not as simple as you make it out to be.

John roberts, F1 has been petrol for years, but they also run without restrictors, they have a lower minimum weight requirement, their cars can’t last more than 3 or 4 hours of racing, they don’t have to have any practical purpose whatsoever, they get an 18000 rpm limit, and spend a lot more money than ALMS and LMS teams.

Just let me know if you want me to keep going. That was not a fair comparison from your part.

Even a team like HRT or Virgin in F1 is spending more money than Pescarolo, or Rebellion.

If Honda jumped in this LMP1 affair with both feet in the sand box they would be a force to be reckoned with. It’s just that Indycar is proving too tasty at the moment. Especially with Lotus and chevrolet joining them next year there, we might even lose the Acura P1 altogether.

Why do you think Porsche canceled the RS Spyder program. Their 3.4 liter DFI engine was only used for a few races in 2008. If Dyson, Horag, team Essex, or cytosport snuck out an RS spyder and bribed someone for one of those penske RS spyder engines we might all see a miracle. Unless Porsche has rounded up all the RS Spyders they had sold.

My point was that there are many excellent petrol engineers around, not that F1 has massive budgets, directed towards sprint races. If the engines are given enough oxygen, they will be able to match diesel outputs and endurance racing for LMP1 would once again become a true competition for all, not the current “A” and “B” race situation. John R.