As the countdown to the first round of the 2016 World Endurance Championship reaches its final stages, DSC caught up with Audi Sport’s Oliver Jarvis to get a sense of just how important this season is going to be for not only himself and his team, but for the championship as a whole:
For this year, Audi have moved up to the six-megajule hybrid category, and brought with them a brand new R18, which looks radically different from the 2015-spec car. That’s going to be a huge test for Audis engineers as they attempt to ensure the car is competitive and reliable from the beginning, taking on the might of Porsche who are contesting the year with an evolved version of the 919, which was dominant last season.
At the Prologue, Porsche were fastest throughout, and Audi had mechanical troubles. Nevertheless, Jarvis stresses that it’s important not to read into anything just yet.
“There’s so many question marks when you’re testing on your own. And to actually go to the Prologue and be on the track with our competition and see what they’re up to really makes it feel like the start of the season now.
“But what we have to be aware of here is the different aero configurations. We had a high downforce setup on the car but it could be that Toyota were be running a Le Mans downforce. That could influence straight-line speed and top speed. Certainly in the second sector. There’s always a trade off.
“While these tests are fantastic, you still go away with uncertainties. You have to do a lot of analysis to get an understanding on where you are.”
It’s certainly too early to tell if the new R18 is going to be a championship winner or not. The model name may well be the same as years past, but just about everything else, has changed.
“It is a completely new car,” said Jarvis. “There’s the other side of that though. With everything being new, there’s a lot of challenges that we’ve faced over the winter. Battery technology is very complex, I think it shows what a good job Porsche and Toyota have done over the past few years.
“We’ve faced a lot of challenges, but I’ve got to say. Look at the car, it’s fantastic. I think over the years where we feel in a lower mega-juke class we’ve been at a disadvantage. We’ve had to try and make up for that with the aero. We also have to remember that we are early in the season. Porsche and Toyota are going to bring update packages for Le Mans. We definitely look the most aggressive from the aero concept side.
“I think our designers have gone all out to optimise every single element they could. We have six mega-juke battery package which is a big step forward from the flywheel system. We need to get more track time.”
A big part of the change, is the move up in hybrid megajule class, to six, from four. It hasn’t taken Jarvis too long to get used to though.
“The driving style hasn’t changed in a sense that the suspension is very similar. Even though it’s a completely new car, with that extra boost power, you might have to spend a bit more time to understand it and get it working in the right way. There’s no use having all this power out of the corner if it creates an imbalance in the car like understeer or excess front tyre wear. It’s all about just working and getting used to that extra boost.”
With the ACO’s new regulations on fuel-flow, the P1 cars’ in theory are set to have a reduction in performance. But whether there will actually be a difference in lap time is something we will have to wait until this weekend to see.
“It’s a question I keep asking the engineers actually because we go to tracks and look at lap times from last year. That’s all we really have to compare against. It’s really hard to put a number on it, but I think it’s had quite a significant difference.
“What’s incredible though is that we’re almost back to the pace that we were doing here last year at the Prologue. It looks like over the winter the engineers have found ways to get that performance back.
“I’d love to know the amount that we’ve lost in terms of time due to the restriction on fuel. It’s somewhere between one to three seconds. It’s a significant amount.
“It may not make too much of a difference at Le Mans interestingly, because that’s all about being efficient with the aero. The tracks with short bursts of acceleration tend to use the most fuel. I’d like to think we’re still going to be putting the same lap times down this year. It’s a shame they reduced it, without that the cars would be savage, phenomenal.”
“They do have to keep an eye on the speed, with the GT cars and LMP2s on track. But wouldn’t it be great to go out there and break more lap records at every track we go to?”
In terms of testing, Jarvis visited both Bahrain and Sebring with the new car prior to the Prologue, and both outings were overall positive.
“Sebring was our first test with the car. There were quite a few little issues,” he revealed. “We didn’t get as much running as we’d like. Overall the car was handling pretty well, which is always nice, and we did very little setup work. The focus was on getting the hybrid system to work and getting everything reliable. It was good straight out the box.”
“I think we’ll find more and more time as the season progresses with setup, as we’re so limited with testing. It sounds crazy I know but the emphasis of course has to be to make the car reliable.
“There were numerous things. Quite often it was little things, it can often have a lot of effects on running. It’s not like the old days where you have maybe something breaking on the car, and now it’s more programming issues that takes an hour to solve. Everything has a knock-on effect on everything else. It certainly changes the way you go about testing. It’s quite fascinating where we’ve started to where we are now.”
Despite having issues with the car at the Prologue too, Jarvis feels it’s not something to worry about for Audi ahead of Silverstone.
“I have complete faith in the Audi designers, mechanics and engineers. It’s not unusual to have problems during the pre-season, that’s what it’s for. I would hope that by the time we arrive at Silverstone, the car is fully reliable, and we’ll be out there fighting for the win. You can never count anything out, there can always be things that happen that didn’t happen during testing that catch you out.
“We are capable of having a quick and reliable car that’s capable of taking the fight to Porsche because towards the end of last year they had an advantage on us. They’re probably in a stronger position because they’ve got an evolution. They’ve proved their reliability over the last season. They’ve stuck with the same tech, and improved over the winter.
“We’re slightly on the back foot with new technology, trying to develop and improve performance. I can understand they’re quietly confident, but at the same time look at what we achieved with four mega-jules.
“You’d be silly to write us off this early in the season.”
