Towards the arrival of “success ballast” in LM P1?

Governed by Technology Equivalence this year, the LM P1 category in 24 Hours of Le Mans and WEC could benefit from a change with a view to better balancing the chances of all the competitors involved, both with hybrid and non-hybrid prototypes.

Thierry Bouvet, technical director of the ACO, confided, in taking stock of the Super-Season before the Le Mans final on June 15 and 16, to work in this direction, while highlighting the positive points of this EoT.

“Regarding the equivalence between naturally aspirated and turbo engines, we have seen that in all past races, it was respected, indicates the technical manager.

For the equivalence between hybrid and non-hybrid cars, the equivalence was approximated, but we were confronted with the maximum physical constraints of non-hybrid cars (it was no longer possible to increase the engine power and no longer possible to lower the car mass).

Of course, we would have liked to have closer races between the hybrid and non-hybrid cars. We are already working on a slightly different system, which could also take race results into account.

We continued the work and proposed the “success ballast” system » (i.e. a mass handicap), which seems to be a very good answer. » Such a system will also appear in GTE Am in 2019-2020.

La dernière table de l’EoT récemment dévoilée alourdira de 10 kg les Toyota TS050 Hybrid, avec pour but de tenter de rapprocher au maximum les LM P1 hybrides des non-hybrides.

“The EOT for Le Mans being more favorable to non-hybrid cars (due to the lower hybrid deployment ratio per kilometer for hybrid cars), we are quite confident that the non-hybrid cars will be very close to the hybrid cars for this super-final. » concludes Bouvet.