The all-time Nordschiefe record has been obliterated. Some say, even a sub five minute lap might be possible.
After watching the lap I can say that high 4:XX is within reach if you let them tweak more and have a at least a few more runs. It is obvious that Timo left himself some margin almost everywhere. Lifting in corners that he didn't need to, braking early to some corners. Few more confidence runs and we will see sub 5 minute lap. 100%
That car would have been five seconds faster if there weren't the big balls of Timo. Hard to drive with 350 kph around the Nordschleife. I did it with about 200, and several times it was a near death experience Well done Timo
Unreal! That prototype is a beast, i wonder how the overall cost is compared with an f1 car of the top teams. Would be nice to drive in rf2, wishful thinking i know. On board lap is orgasmic, 370 kph in the long straight, 320 at the exit and slowly to 300 before preparing for the last corners, respect. Does it have active aero? Cornering grip is f1 like and then it reaches top speed like its nothing could they have eliminated electric power unit torque loss at high revs, or maybe its hiding some alien technology underneath? I havent found any blog being really technical about it but they make it sound really simple idk maybe f1 is a joke even in the technical part after all ok exaggerating (a bit) haha, but i still think they make good fun of FIA and F1. I mean spending 150.000 euros in f1 for a front wing that lasts about 4 months (and who knows how long to research / to put it in perspective indycar whole aero package from dallara costs 70.000 usd) before the new one... and gains 0.1 sec given the current rules which also change frequently. Or to put it differently lets ask the question how much it costs to gain 0.5 sec in f1 for the teams that can afford such development, from which the sport and fans gain nothing from it , instead f1 cars must stay 50 meters apart not to spoil the aero!
About spendings. Back in a days when ingenuity was a big factor in success and not refinement F1 was much, much cheaper. When you take into account inflation, best teams still were operating using half of todays budgets. Rule book had a lot more freedom for the designers and making a big jump in performance sometimes needed only a person with brilliant idea. Building a part and implementing it was a small % of what today they need to make progress. Why? Because most powerful teams spend lots of money on army of designers that have to produce designs for a new front wing which is refinement of what they already have. Because rule book strictly says what you can and cannot do. So you are locked inside a small box of what is possible and therefore that army of engineers have to design 100 different designs of a front wing which then maybe 3 or 4 get to the wind tunnel and since then it has to be produced with all of it's complexity it costs a fortune to build a front wing that has a small change in angle of the tip of endplates that if you are a layman you won't ever notice it. Then there's a chance that this very small change that was hoped to give 0.1 s of improvement, appears to not have worked. Those wings that you produced are going to the trash bin. They want to introduce budget caps to make it more fair for all teams. On paper it will but in practice it will be a fight of golden bullets. If you get a car right then you will be able to start working on a next year car because for your opponents catching up to you will be extremely difficult, for the teams that didn't get it right and fixing that would require a lot of time and... money. Which now they can't spend because of the cap. So what needs to be done to make F1 cheaper again? Free up the rulebook! It will be more about who has better ideas and who is thinking more outside the box rather who has more money to invest into an army of engineers who will then build a truckload of parts that would be thrown onto a car trying to see what sticks. Coming back to LMP1 Porsche Evo. Big help for them is the fact that LMP is not an open wheel class. Tyres are the biggest enemy of any aerodynamicist because they create lots of drag, turbulence which screws up the airflow which is king of any efficient car in F1. I can assure you that if you covered the wheels in F1 with some kind of wheelarches, properly sealing them car would instantly go 1,5-2 s faster. Both in corners and straights. With not that much money spend. Then there is the issue of tyres. Michelin tyres that are being used in WEC are considered to be the best racing tyre in use around the whole world. Insane amount of grip, little to no fade from pushing them hard and durability of a tank. Meaning that they can focus more on getting performance out of them rather how to balance the performance with wear and safety aspect. Having way more powerful ERS system is another thing. Insane torque of that helps with overcoming the inertia of a heavy-ish car like LMP1 car out of a corner and when the car gets going properly fast and electric energy ends engine has less issue of pulling the car more on straights. My idea of fixing F1 would be like this: - Active suspension - Ban bargeboards or allow them as a single element. - Reintroduce fixed curtains on the edge of a floor which in my mind should be wider and longer. - Set a rule for max length of a car which in my mind could be at least 1 m shorter. - Get rid of Y250 entirely. Narrow wing that will be inwash again instead of outwash like it is since 2009. - Instead of budget cap maybe personel cap. Let's say like 250 people per team. - Bring back testing in season - Relax rulebook in every other area - Bring back tyre war and at least 15" wheels It might not be perfect at first but has also big chance of being the change F1 needs to become what it once was.
F1 is an arms race. So costs are only ever going to go up and never going to come down. Even in 1967 budgets would have been higher than in 1957. Same as comparing the two nuclear programmes of the USSR and the USA. As the missiles got bigger, so did the costs and no penny spared in making sure it was achieved.
Very interesting thanks i dont know much about WEC and prototypes but porsche certainly attracts attention with such a car. My point of view is mainly to say that f1 even as a 50% motorsport and 50% being a fabulous circus, with the money involved seemed like the cutting edge and "sells" like such, an edge which proves kind of rounded right here... and then competition & spectacle it offers suffers imo and its not helped efficiently by rules so far, instead it has become more and more a battle vs the rulebook. Technical aspect is much more interesting i think when it translates into absolute lap times,speed and efficiency, hiring 1000 people in one team to battle some rules is not a sport for me, the whole thing is a bit pointless and way over-complicated at this point, on the other hand it offers plenty of jobs on the field! Like what you propose for people per team cap, i read something about moving people to secondary teams with the new spending cap coming but maybe a workers per team cap would be also good and people absorbed and financed (teams) by tv rights re-distributed or whatever means possible, but you know ferrari and other top teams are already worried about this change, maybe ferrari should build their own championship like other manufacturers do. Thing is prototypes unlike modern f1 can follow the car very closely providing exiting moments, (GT classes for sure) so maybe replace f1 with cars like this or even race against each other , that would be a change at least, i recently watched live Coulthard that had to explain once gain how the race was not boring and i was thinking oh boy one of the same, exactly the same as 20 years before when f1 became boring and now its even worse, like u say how outwash vortex helps racing by disturbing following car aero reaching side by side, in races where highlights come from faster car/driver being penalised for car component fail and being dropped back in the grid overtaking slower cars. They even changed the tracks to adapt to their cars, with DRS and zones followed by hairpins, slow stadium sections where according to Alonso , Verstappen fans gather, lol!
