The annual 24 Hours of Le Mans race occurred last weekend and, after years of trying and failing, through breakdowns and superior competition, Toyota finally won the thing, becoming only the second Japanese manufacturer in history to win, the other being Mazda, who used to have freaking awesome race cars. It certainly helped Toyota this year that Porsche and Audi no longer competed in the LMP1 class, leaving them as the only factory team in the World Endurance Championship. It’s awfully easy to come in first when you have the fastest car in the fastest class without any other competitors. Regardless, they didn’t breakdown, which itself is a feat in endurance racing. Porsche meanwhile dominated the LMGTE Pro and Amateur classes with its 911 RSRs, with the number 92 Pink Pig Porsche winning the pro class. You can clearly see why it was called the pink pig, and appreciate that fans were calling the car’s pit stops “pigstops.”
Overall, the race was pretty uneventful, which makes for pretty boring watching. Part of that comes from the fact that new rules meant that no team was allowed to run more than 14 laps per stint and that there was a per-stint fuel limit that was, in many cases, less fuel than the cars were capable of holding, making for some headaches in the pits and a few mistakes that cost drivers time. Another part is because the rules have stifled competition so much that racing has become too expensive for many manufacturers to take part. Thus, Porsche and Audi’s departure for Formula E.
Fortunately, things will be changing in a couple years, as the FIA announced shortly before the race some exciting changes that are coming to the World Endurance Championship. The LMP1 class which currently consists only of Toyota, will be scrapped entirely, being replaced instead with a hypercar-type class that will impose limits on car power, weight, weight distribution, aerodynamics and downforce, but with more freedom to design the cars more closely to road-going hypercars and supercars. This not only gives the race a bit more relevance to real-world drivers, it gives companies a chance to test technology they may be actually able to use on the roads in their hypercars. The class will still mandate a hybrid drivetrain, but internal combustion engines can be up to the manufacturer, so long as they’re limited to 697 horsepower, which is still a lot, especially when paired with a standard 268 horsepower hybrid electric motor. Race commissioners say they want to move the series to the point where “manufacturers can win at Le Mans on a limited budget,” and I’m sure that’s relative, but still a good sign that may invite more competition moving forward. The new rules will be introduced in 2020 and we’ll apparently get to vote on the name of the class, so I look forward to watching the hypercars compete in the racy mcrace-face class in the not-too-distant future.
Authored by
Devlin Riggs