Wednesday Racing Thread
Open to all subscribers, focusing on LeMans this week but anything goes
A remarkable number of my friends and acquaintances either flew to LeMans on their own dime, took one of the manufacturer flat-out-fuckin’-bribes experience opportunities to get the business-class best of everything at no cost, or simply perched in front of a paid stream all weekend to catch the race. Your humble author did none of the above and was content to get occasional updates via Instagram.
Intellectually, I know I should be interested. LeMans is the self-appointed pinnacle of closed-fender racing, a grueling test of man and machine, Truth In 24, all of that. Oh, but it’s just so boring! Here’s a dirty little secret of endurance racing: it bores almost everyone, even the people who are doing it. You can be in the actual car, doing the race yourself, and still be bored out of your skull at the prospect of turning fifty laps in a row at a pace that intrigues neither you nor the car but is exactly what’s required at the moment if your team is going to succeed.
Sixty years ago, the cars were on the legitimate technological edge and therefore it was a matter of some interest as to whether your chosen manufacturer was going to make it to the end. This is no longer the case. Everything south of LMP2 is a retail-sold customer car of one sort or another, driven by “spanks”. The prototypes are either Radical-adjacent LMP2 cars — back in 2010, the word “adjacent” wasn’t there, as Radical themselves campaigned a lovely Judd-engined “SR9” with mild success — or prototypes groaning beneath the Harrison Bergeron weight of a thousand competitive adjustments.
A lot of people were quite excited about the “Garage 56” NASCAR entry, which was strictly present as a PR stunt but which nonetheless made the viewers happy. The rest of the event was virtually pre-determined by the last-minute ballast penalties handed out to Toyota and Ferrari. The only real influence the drivers could have on the proceedings was a negative one, as shown by Jack Aitken (crashed a Cadillac on lap one) and Ryo Hirakawa (trashed the only Toyota with a chance of winning).
By all accounts it was good racing — but I’d sure like to see LeMans try a few years with no competitive adjustments, a stable rule book, and plenty of incentives for manufacturers to do their best. This year the Toyotas were a full fifteen seconds slower than they’d been in previous years. That’s not right. The cars should be getting faster, not slower. Perhaps the 250mph peaks of the Eighties are too dangerous — in which case you shorten the straights yet again.
In any event, I will turn the discussion of this and other motorsports events over to all of you; perhaps “Sherman McCoy” will be kind enough to offer his considered opinion.
I have been watching top level motorsport since 1998 or so; that was the year I become a fervent fan of both Formula 1 and Le Mans. I had the good fortune to attend the inaugural Petit Le Mans in the early autumn of that year, which occasioned the opportunity to see the Le Mans-winning Porsche 911 GT1-98 (the famous mid-engined “911” prototype in Mobil 1 livery) both compete and - later in the race - take flight. My father and I saw the infamous backflip and assumed - in the pre-social media days - that the driver (Yannick Dalmas) had been badly hurt, or worse. Fortunately, he walked away.
In the earlier days, it was difficult to follow Le Mans, especially as our cable package in remote, rural Appalachia did not include Speedvision. Now, however, things are quite different. You can stream the full 24 hours commercial free. Which I do every year, save for 2018 when I was there to watch Porsche’s “Pink Pig” win the GTE Pro class while guzzling Cristal and noshing on Ox Tartare with Wolfgang Porsche.
I watched about 20 hours of this year’s Grand Prix of Endurance and Efficiency. Obviously, I don’t find it boring! I look forward to Le Mans all year, just as many look forward to The Masters or other sporting events. I even watched the hours of pre-race practice and qualifying with rapt attention.
I thought the BOP was unimpeachable - all of the factory Hypercar efforts had opportunities to lead the race overall on merit. Whereas the other OEMs brought two cars (Ferrari, Toyota, Peugeot) or three cars (Cadillac), Porsche brought four cars (three factory, one privateer). Unfortunately for Porsche, their new 963 proved to be slow, fragile, and operated by a subpar partner in Penske (for the factory cars).
Regarding BOP as a philosophy for managing competition: without BOP, there would be no sports car racing. There is not enough interest in the sport to open up the rule book and allow competitors to run what they brung. It would kill the sport dead swiftly. Ironically, the BOP-free pinnacle of motorsport is Formula 1, which remains Euro-centric culturally. The egalitarian impulse of BOP took off in the land of the free and found favor in the WEC. The top class of Le Mans was BOP-free as recently as 2017.
On Jack’s point about the cars being slower around the Circuit de la Sarthe than they were in previous years: sanctioning bodies carefully manage top speed and outright lap times for many reasons. Formula 1 routinely makes efforts to slow down the cars for safety (and tire limitations). NASCAR has run restrictor plates at Superspeedways for decades. The Circuit de la Sarthe is, fundamentally, a street circuit, so safety (and insurance) are considerations, especially given the closing speeds between top class prototypes driven by ex-Formula 1 drivers and slower GT cars driven by prosperous dentists or Dollywood heirs. In the rain. At night.
The Garage 56 publicity worked on me. I loved watching the Camaro going around Circuit de la Sarthe. But I also didn't know anything about what goes on in the background, and learning a little about that is... disappointing. It sounded so cool, though, especially juxtaposed as it was against the LMP and GTE cars.