Next up in the DSC series to look at Sportscar and GT programmes that never made it into competition is a rather recent casualty to circumstances.
Strakka Racing has, in the current century, campaigned LMP1, LMP2, GT1 and GT3 machinery in major endurance races and Championships.
They have a Le Mans win to their name (in LMP2 in 2010) as well as Blancpain Endurance Cup Pro-Am class success in 2018 before the team closed its doors before the start of 2020.
They had a couple of cracks at LMP1, with some success – Le Mans Series in 2009 with a Ginetta-Zytek and then 2012 and 2013, the first two season of the FIA WEC, with an HPD.
Thereafter they turned to LMP2, with a bold plan to bring back a famous racing brand to international endurance racing, and establish themselves as commercial partners into the bargain.
Setting The Scene
The scene is set below by then Team Principal Dan Walmsley:
“In 2012 and 2013 we competed with the HPD in LMP1 guise – In 2010 we had a phenomenal year with the HPD P2 car (winning Le Mans in class and setting pole and taking the first-ever overall Le Mans Series win for a P2 car at the Hungaroring, a race that featured a five-car LMP1 entry!)”
2011 though saw a slump as new cost cap regulations, and a rather fumbled BoP saw the HPD V6 turbo and the Nissan V8 significantly apart in terms of performance until well into the second half of the season, Strakka were floundering.
By then though team owner Nick Leventis had his eye on the new for 2012 FIA World Endurance Championship and a move back to LMP1 after the team had decided against a foray into the ALMS.
The WEC LMP1 programme, with an HPD ARX-03a was announced at Silverstone’s ILMC round in 2011 but there were troubles ahead.
2012 saw the HPDs (Strakka and JRM) run a narrow front Michelin tyre, with the factory Audis (and later the Toyota too) on a wider front tyre (developed for front end hybrid power delivery). For 2013 Michelin stopped making the narrow front tyre and HPD produced a package update with wider front tyres and different weight distribution and power steering and suspension geometry.
The reality was though that the privateer cars could never get the tyres working because the compounds were not designed for a car designed without front-wheel drive power delivery, an issue that as not resolved until the current WEC season!
There were further issues ahead for the Privateer LMP1 pack as the class moved to a new set of restricted fuel flow regulations – for Strakka there was a stark thee way choice: Find a new LMP1 car, grandfather a car that was already uncompetitive anyway or leave the class.
“We’d evaluated all manner of things prior to that,” said Walmsley, “including purchasing the new (eventually unbuilt) HPD LMP1 car and also a potential partnership with Multimatic.”
LMP2 Plans Emerge
A left-field option though presented itself as Karl Patman, then Strakka crew chief had previously worked with Dome in the RN Motorsport days on the Dome S101 and suggested the Japanese operation might be worth a look.
“Karl and I went and reviewed the facilities at Dome with Hiroshi Fushida and were absolutely blown away by the level of infrastructure that they had there. They became a serious potential partner.”
With the future programme, some way off the team were dealt a heavy blow at Le Mans with Jonny Kane suffering a huge shunt in qualifying, the repairs digging very deep into the team’s limited stock of spares.
That led directly to a budget-based decision to pull out of the WEC season after Le Mans and consolidate resources to enable the, by then agreed, programme with Dome to develop an LMP2 car for the following (2014) season.
The plan for the car that would become the Strakka-Dome S103 was for Strakka to take delivery of two cars, the team assured of exclusivity for the first season before customer cars were made available for 2015, with Strakka providing the trackside spares and technical back up services for customers, part of the commercial plan to recoup some of the money spent on development.
S103 Problems
Problems soon started though with the programme running late with its general design and delivery. Deadlines were being missed and when Strakka finally took delivery of the first car, there were some fundamental issues.
“The car was overweight, both against our design target and the regulatory minimum and that was a significant issue,” Dan Walmsley said. “We’d set a target weight to give us ballast that we could move about in the car to get the best balance and performance.”
The second major issue was the aerodynamics where we had major issues with the splitter, we had big drag and no downforce!”
Problem three was that Dome had designed a very aggressive, very low rear deck height and that meant the S103 needed quite an extreme suspension packaging – put bluntly it didn’t work! That showed clearly in our early seven post rig testing. We were in real trouble.”
That effectively called time on the car’s debut in 2014 – and Strakka’s race programme for the season.
Again, Dan Walmsley explains the genesis of the issues:
“Two things had gone wrong.
“One was a separation of resources. When we went to see Dome they had an excellent 40% scale wind tunnel. They had a huge design office and a plethora of R&D labs and workshops to do a huge range of work from component stress tests to CNC machining – just the works!
“You then went through a big double door and straight into Carbon Magic, which is the sister company of Dome, the carbon fibre composites business.
“In between the first visit and meetings through to the day that the contract got signed, Carbon Magic was sold to Toray, and the wind tunnel was sold to TRD.
“Minoru Hayashi, the owner of Dome was getting on in years and had decided that he no longer wanted to be active in the business and the resources available to the project were reduced.
“So that’s where it started to go wrong.
“Then there were communications issues, which left us with a car that was delivered late, had poor aerodynamic performance, poor mechanical installation stiffness, and it was overweight.”
A crisis meeting in London with Fushida San saw some tough-talking and Strakka taking the reins for the recovery drive. They would rectify the car in the UK.
“So we had a partnership TotalSim, a big CFD study on the car. We redesigned the rear suspension, that together with Dome, and then Strakka technicians set about the car trying to find 54 kilos of dead weight.”
The process saw an entirely new rear suspension. “We ended up having some little bulges on the engine cover.”
And the car went on a diet with 50 kilos taken out of the package.
Even more significantly the combined team found a c.40% improvement in terms of lift over drag.
Back To Racing
The 2015 WEC season saw Strakka finally race the S103, the only LMP2 runner on Michelins in the Championship.
The car was pretty much competitive in single-lap pace, but the Michelins seemed unable to maintain that pace over longer
At Silverstone, the new car finished fourth but was promoted to the podium after another competition was penalised post-race. It struggled at Spa, the team finding it tough to extract competitive pace from the car.
Thereafter Strakka reached out to Dunlop, and in a private test in high downforce trim the S103 set a time faster than the Pole time of the previous race weekend.
Suddenly the car looked like it was coming into its window with the investment and hard work suddenly looking set to see real payback.
However, at Le Mans, the rapid redevelopment programme caught up with the team.
“We went to the Le Mans, and the car was compromised,” Dan Walmsley explained. “In the efforts to try and get the aero sorted out from the original car to the update we couldn’t get enough front downforce off the car.
“The consequence of that is that we could either run it with very low drag, but it was very ‘on its nose’ and very unstable at high speed, or you had to run quite a bit of wing to keep the car stable but then you were slow on the straights and at Le Mans it was killing us.”
The car qualified only 14th in class – four seconds off the pole and despite a fairly steady run retired in the 17th hour when the gearbox let go.
The potential plan to continue post Le Mans on Dunlops for the remainder of the season could have seen the S103 become a winner.
However, that prospect ignores entirely the background situation
LMP2 Regulation Change Intervenes
Strakka effectively came into WEC with the Dome as a manufacturer with a business model that supported customer sales.
The timing though proved unfortunate as this was the year when the ACO decided on a new formula for 2017 with only four chassis manufacturers in LMP2 and the new Gibson engines.
That effectively wrote off the investment that Strakka had made in the class. Without a chassis licence, the Dome would be obsolete in LMP2 just two years safer its race debut.
By Le Mans 2015 the team knew that they were going to have to find a new plan for 2016 – or race elsewhere.
Strakka was approached by Gibson who was trying to sell one of the ex-Greaves Motorsport cars. The team bought the secondhand Gibson P2 to complete the WEC season.
The S103B LMP1 Programme – Rise and Fall!
Whilst the team switched to the Gibson for their WEC race programme, a separate effort began to convert the Dome S103 LMP2 car into a Strakka S103B LMP1 car for the 2016 season. For a third time, Strakka were looking to join the premier prototype class.
That decision was despite some readily acknowledged bad blood, the regulation change in LMP2 had cost Strakka (and others) significant time and resource and had brought their much-hoped-for commercial package in LMP2 to a premature conclusion.
Despite all of that the management and commercial team at Strakka Racing had managed to put together a programme that got the approval of their key stakeholders to go ahead with a tightly budgeted two-year LMP1 programme.
The design work started and advanced discussions were underway with a number of engine manufacturers.
“There was the option to go with a normally aspirated big bang Gibson engine which we knew would be reliable and just do a job. There were conversations too with AER, and very positive talks with HPD about effectively a derivative of their IndyCar engine as a proposal for LMP1.
“And there was a parallel IndyCar-related proposal too from Ilmor, an endurance adaptation of their Chevrolet engine developed and built by Ilmor that could have ended up as being branded either by Ilmor, or by Strakka.
The prospect then was the Dome S103 chassis, powered by one or other then current Indycar engines with a fully reskinned bodywork (as per the renders pictured here.
“The performance figures (from simulation) were very good, above our targets. We had a good idea of what we felt the baselines were at Porsche and Audi and what they were doing, and what figures we needed to hit as a privateer.
“We felt we were there on the first iteration so it was just looking spectacular.”
Whist technical progress was being made though there are escalating fiscal realities to deal with:
“The logistics of WEC was just getting more and more expensive year on year, says Walmsley. “The fuel flow regulations about having to run multiple fuel metering systems and having to carry two spares saw further expense added. Those meters are c.50 grand each!
“You added a quarter of a million to the cost of the project just with the fuel flow metering piece alone.
“You then look at the cost of delivering the programme in totality and it basically got to a point where we felt we couldn’t do justice to the programme with what we had left.
“After a lot of excitement and potential we ultimately had to park the project that at that point.”
The escalation in the budget had cost the WEC a potential LMP1 entry.
So all that exists of that programme, apart from a lot of paperwork, are the renders you see here and a few basic components being built.
With thanks to Nick Leventis for the permission to use the renders, Dan Walmsley and Nick Bailey (Elan PR)
