Can't Beat them? Ban them!!

[Jims5543]

Thats the way it looks to be heading with the ALMS. They have added weight penalties to the R-10 and now have allowed the R-10's competitors larger fuel tanks.

So while not banned, it seems the other guys get considerations bacause they were sleeping from a technology standpoint.

This pisses me off so much because in 1993 when Mazda was the 1st Japanese car company to win the 24 hours they were banned.

ALMS also banned them from the road races the likes of Jim Downing and Roger Mandaville were basically shut down.

Anybody remember the big 3 getting the Miller banned from the Indy 500 many moons ago because they could not compete?

Bah!!!

[lendaddy]

I thought this was a thread about Mul

[trekkor]

I thought it was about RPKESQ. Is he banned yet?

D'oh.


KT


I'm kidding...

[pwd72s]

Racing organizations make the rules. We decide whether or not to buy tickets or tune in.

[dd74]

I saw this happening from a mile away. I think it's more ironic that Penske has been heralding the diesel as the future powerplant of automobiles - even though his Porsches have been handed their asses by the R-10. Hilarious!

The fact is anyone who follows motorsports now knows about Audi, its diesels and its direct injection. With a huge corporation such as that, racing is only a way to showcase the goods before they get to the public. And as the public becomes more aware, Audi sales potentially rise. The R-10 has proven its point, enough said.

Of course, ALMS is nothing but a subset of the U.S. in general, where at this date, American consumers can't even purchase diesels, let alone Audi diesels.

[Anton]

The Diesels had a clear advantage from the start. They are allowed more displacement, larger restrictors, and more boost. All the rules change does is make the series more competitive. Happens every time one design has an advantage over others. In the end it's a good thing.

[TheMentat]

Originally posted by Anton
The Diesels had a clear advantage from the start. They are allowed more displacement, larger restrictors, and more boost. All the rules change does is make the series more competitive. Happens every time one design has an advantage over others. In the end it's a good thing.

Couldn't agree more... it is difficult to set up an equivalency formula that will result in competitive racing. However, I think part of the problem is that Audi is also in a class of its own in P1 when it comes to professionalism. I could be wrong about his, but I think some of the technical regulations are being used to close the gap in race engineering capabilities...

[Noah930]

even though his Porsches have been handed their asses by the R-10. Hilarious!

LMP1 vs. LMP2

Audi's R10 is supposed to make the Porsche Spyders look like junior varsity cars. Not to take anything away from the brilliance of the Audi, but the fact that that Penske's Spyders can even be a thorn in Audi's side is impressive.

[masraum]

This has been happening for years, what's the big deal

[pmajka]

Hey, who won the race over the weekend in each class...PVR cut off the last 1 minute of the race???

[sammyg2]

how about this? They make the audis play by the same rules as everyone else as far as weight, displacement, and boost. how do you think they would do? Dead last.
They gave the diesels a huge and unfair advantage because they were diesels, now they are just taking away part of that unfair advantage. They realized they screwed up bigtime and are trying to fix their screw up.

The R10 is allowed up to a 5.5 liter turbocharged or supercharged engine because it burns diesel fuel, it's non-diesel LMP-1 compretitors can only run a 4 liter turbocharged engine. For our math-challenged friends that's almost a 40% displacement advantage for the audi. Where you aware of that when you posted this thread? On top of the huge displacement allowance the R10 gets to run 3 bar and has twin intake restrictors of almost 40mm each. Yea, that's fair.
I don't think I'll shed a tear Audi.

They should say in each class a car can have a maximum displacement, a minimum weight and let it go at that. no intake restrictors, no rev limitations, nothng else. Burn diesel or gas, who cares as long as they play by the same rules.
If they did that the R10s would not be competitive at all. They would be gathering dust in a barn because they would be worthless as race cars.

The Porsche LMP-2 cars can only run a 2 liter engine and they are almost as fast as the 5.5 liter diesels. Technology my butt.

[sammyg2]

The audis are also allowed adjustable inlet vanes in the turbocharger, the porsches are not.
Beginning next january, the maximum noise level wil lbe 113 db, again the advantage will go to audi.
When they go to closed cockpits they will have to run air conditioning, again advantage audi. the diesls don't get as hot as the gasoline engines.
The rules are full of things that benefit the Audi R10 and penalize their
competitors. Wow, they get all kinds of breaks and win all the races. go figure.

[Jims5543]

How about this? They made the rules! Audi used the rules to their advantage and decided to give the Diesel a go.

Then part of the way through the season they change the rules? When a team has spent the entire off season developing their car according to the rules.

Maybe I am a little sore over all the Mazda rule changes over the years mid season. Everyone laughed at the Mazda entry in the 24 hours of Lemans, until it won, then there was outrage and immediate banning.

You make lots of valid points Sam. But, Audi was cleaning their clocks last year with a gas engine R8. They chose to rise to the challange of developing a diesel powered car, that, I bet most were laughing at before the car rolled out for its first test. I personally didn't think it would be competative. I thought its sheer lack of engine RPM's would limit it. Boy, was I wrong.

[Carrera3.5L]

Originally posted by Jim Cesiro
Maybe I am a little sore over all the Mazda rule changes over the years mid season. Everyone laughed at the Mazda entry in the 24 hours of Lemans, until it won, then there was outrage and immediate banning.

Actually, Mazda didn't win at LeMans in 1993 as you stated, it was 1991...

And yes, I have to admit that I used to laugh at the RX-792P at the GTP events, because those knuckleheads could never figure out how to even route the exhaust for the 3-rotor and kept catching the bodywork on fire (one car even burned to the ground). I felt bad for Price Cobb, he deserved better...

They waited much too long to enter GTP, they should have just stayed with the little boys in Camel Lights...

Oh Sammy, Porsche's Spyder uses a 3.4L motor, not a 2L...

They tried the no equivalency thing in the '80s with Group C racing and instead only gave you a certain amount of fuel for the race. If you burned it all up, you literally sat in front of the finish line to wait for the checkered flag to fall so you could crawl across. Yeah, that was pure racing all right...

You have to hand it to Audi, the quick disconnect behind the bulkhead for an engine/gearbox/rear suspension change was absolutely ingenious for sports car racing, remember the look on the Chrysler boys faces at LeMans when they had an over 1 hour gearbox change while dicing with Audi during the night and the Audi simply swapped the whole rear assembly of the car in 20 minutes? Priceless!

Ralph

[sammyg2]

Ralph, you're right. the spyder is allowed a larger engine because it is non-turbocharged. if it was a turbo it could only use a 2 liter engine.
I was looking at the regulations and got it all mixed up when I wrote it down.
Point was, LMP-2 is supposed to be slower than LMP-1.

In ALMS, rules are changed almost every week to try and even out the competition. Weight is added to the winners, the loosers get a break. Thewre has been around 13 of these "competitor bulletins" so far this year, in 2005 they made 25 of them.
I don't really like it at all unless one type of car has a huge advantage and the competitors can't compete as in the case of the R10. That's when it ruins the racing.
Just like can-am in 73 and 74, porsche was kicking butt and it discouraged the competition to the point where they decided to look elsewhere, the series basically died because of it.

edit: here's a link to hte competition changes:
http://www.imsaracing.net/imsaNS2.cfm?h=/2003/series/alms/header.htm&p=/2003/competitors/indexnewalms.htm

[Carrera3.5L]

Sammy, if they didn't adjust the rules midseason in ALMS to make it competitive, there wouldn't be anyone left racing...

Yesterday's race at Road America was a typical ALMS race: sparse. The Audi's, Dyson Lola's & another Lola in LMP1, the Spyders & Interscope in LMP2, the Corvettes & Astons in GT1 and a host of RSR's, an M3, a couple of Esperante's and F430's in GT2. That's it, you think IRL and Champ Cars have troubles filling out a field?

You HAVE to have rules (sometimes changed from race to race) to try and make it competitive. Look at the Group C vs GTP scenario: Group C could literally do whatever you want (engine displacement, turbocharging, etc) but you were allocated a certain amount of fuel and that was it. If you could make 1,500 bhp (which some cars could, the 962C was over 1,000 without restrictors and HIGH boost) but only got 1 mpg you were going to be in trouble in a 1,000 km race. My analogy in my previous post was a common occurence. A car would have a huge lead, get less mileage than what they hoped, and literally sat at the finish line waiting for the race to end or ran out of gas. Meanwhile, other cars that had less power and better fuel mileage simply kept chugging along, making up the laps they fell behind and ended up winning the race...no wonder the demise of Group C. I absolutely despised it...

IMSA tried to do it differently. To encourage a variety of manufacturers to participate (and stay), they HAD to have an engine equivalency formula. You had Porsche with a 3.0L/3.2L single turbo (later twin-turbo) flat 6, Nissan with a 3.0L twin-turbo V6, Jaguar with a 7L V12 and later 3.0L twin-turbo V6, Chevy with a twin-turbo V6 & Chevy/Pontiac/Ford with big-block V8's, Toyota with a 2.1L turbo 4-cyl, Mazda with a 3-rotor, I'm missing others but these were the major players. How do you make it work?

Turbo restrictors and car weight's were the major ways they made it fairly equivalent. If you give everyone a clean sheet to work from and no rules, you only have one or two manufacturers who have the resources, technology or desire to even participate, what fun is it to see only a handful of cars on the track (and have to shell out big bucks to see)?

The German DTM series was another example: Audi, BMW, Ford, Mercedes, Opel were spending HUGE amounts of money, in the heyday they had more spectators at their events other than F1 events and some manufacturers/teams spent almost as much money as F1 teams. It was great racing, think NASCAR except on road courses driving saloon (sedans). You won on Sunday, you were penalized on Monday with a weight increase and kept putting the pounds on until someone else won and everything was balanced out.

If you have one manufacturer run away with the series due to superior technology and/or a huge financial budget, pretty soon you no longer will have a series...

ALMS is set-up to be a Manufacturers series, but Audi, Porsche, Corvette & Panoz (all different classes) are the only ones playing (Acura in 2007). If it weren't for the privateers & a few "unofficial" factory entries, the series would already have the life support plug pulled.

Audi vs. Dyson in LMP1 & Porsche vs. Interscope in LMP2. Yeah, a real competitive balance...

Ralph

[Por_sha911]

Racing history is full of rule changes that put a winning car out of contention. Its called politics. Porsche has been bitten many times over the years in more than one venue. Like pwd72s said: we vote with our ticket purchases (note to mention hats, t-shirts, and autographed posters).

[jeffgrant]

This was covered in Racecar Engineering a few issues back.

ALMS intentionally gave a TON of breaks to the Audi diesel project so that they would be inclined to go ahead and build and then run the R-10.

And, Audi STILL hasn't released all of the performance stats on the car... some people think that they're sandbagging.

Audi are not stupid, they knew this was coming, from day 1.

The "noise" of them complaining and threatening to back out of the series is simple posturing, IMO, in order to limit the restrictions that they will be facing.

They're playing the game, and I don't think they'll be going anywhere soon.

[Carrera3.5L]

Originally posted by jeffgrant
ALMS intentionally gave a TON of breaks to the Audi diesel project so that they would be inclined to go ahead and build and then run the R-10.

And why wouldn't ALMS give them "incentives"? Does ALMS really have a choice? What kind of series would it be if your marquee make was a Dyson Lola run by a privateer team (albeit a good one) that ran in the top class against who now? Would there even be a series? Would anyone other than a complete sports car racing gearhead even watch?????????????

Ralph

[jeffgrant]

I'm not saying that they shouldn't have given them incentives... I'm actually all for them. I was just pointing out that they were given, and they were pretty big incentives, as there were a LOT of unknowns going into it.

But now that the car is built, and people are starting to see the performance, and it is almost completely dominate, I think it's time to reign in some of those restrictions and make it a somewhat level playing field with the other cars.

It's NOT fun to watch the thing win race after race, especially with all the advantages it was given... that's just unfair to the other LMP1's.

Unfortunately, there are a ton of rules that have to be "interpreted" and "adjusted" for diesels... from displacement to the size of fuel restrictors etc, because they just aren't the same, so the same rules cannot apply. As long as this "rule conversion/adjustment" has to go on to try and make the gas and diesel specs result in the same performance, there will be people complaining.

It's going to be a bit of a roller coaster as they try and get things sorted... no different than the Corvettes and Aston Martins in GT1.

$0.02 (CDN)