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24 Hours of Le Mans 2018 - Toyota's Race to Lose


elfenix

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Guide to watching: https://jalopnik.com/heres-how-you-can-watch-and-stream-all-of-the-2018-24-1826780668

Spotter's guide: http://www.spotterguides.com/portfolio/18_lm/

 

Alonso is driving for Toyota in the only LMP1 Hybrid team in the field.  There are other LMP1 teams but none are hybrids (unlike last year, where both LMP1 teams were hybrid).  If the hybrids are equally reliable, then they'll win with 10 or 20 laps in the bag.  But that's a big if.  Toyota says they've had "NASA-like" prep for this one. But as costly as an LMP1 Hybrid is to run, I can't imagine they weren't doing the same last year or the year before (famously pulling over on the last lap) :

 

Up against Toyota in LMP1 is Rebellion Racing, back with a 2 car effort after a year in LMP2 (using the Rebellion R13, a heavily reworked P2 chassis and engine combo), and the Russian SMP Racing/BR Engineering car driven by Jenson Button and Mikhail Aleshin is looking strong (US-based Dragonspeed racing is using the BR1 chassis as a customer car for its lone P1 entrant).  There's a field of 10 LMP1 cars including the hybrids, but the non-hybrids will need to pit 1 lap more often (10 instead of 11), and so far are slightly slower despite balance of performance rules to give Toyota some competition. 

 

Toyota TS050 analysis

 

Arguably, reliability has been the source of Toyota’s previous dramas at Le Mans, which is why the team focused its testing programme on reliability and coping with failure modes. Clocking a total of 21,000km at pre-season testing, both the drivers and teams practised dealing with a vast array of failure modes.

 

 

Rebellion R13 analysis

 

‘The main motivator for Rebellion to come back into P1 is not to win the championship, it is to win Le Mans,’ says team owner Bart Hayden. ‘You have a car that looks similar to the ORECA 07 P2 car, but it generates more downforce for less drag, weighs 100kg less, has got 60 to 70bhp more than the P2, in Le Mans trim, so it should be pretty handy, but I am not sure that it is handy enough to keep up with the Toyota.’

 

 

SMP/BR1 analysis

 

The BR Engineering BR1 car has been developed in collaboration with Dallara and together, using the LMP2 car as a baseline, an all new carbon fibre chassis was born. This chassis comes in two slightly different versions to cater for the three different engine configurations available to the LMP1 non hybrids. One variant allows a turbo installation to run with the Mecachrome or AER powerplant, while the other suits the normally aspirated Gibson engine.

Edited by elfenix
goddamn shitty editor decided that my close spoiler tag should be at the bottom instead of immediately after the video where i fucking placed it and now everything is fucked up.
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*feed is in car with alonso going into the 2nd mulsanne chicane*

*feed cuts to a man in the pits*

"now why would you cut away from that to focus on a man in adidas glasses?"

really liking velocity's coverage, but they can't do shit about the world feed director.  do wish they were rolling tape so they could show us things that happen in the commercials, like bourdais' pass earlier.  

 

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