The opening race of the 2019/20 FIA WEC sees a sextet of LMP1s, one up on the initially expected total, contesting the shortest ever planned WEC race.
There are several headlines amongst the six, so let’s take a look team by team.
Rebellion Racing – Rebellion R-13 Gibson
#1 – Bruno Senna, Gustavo Menezes, Norman Nato
#3 – Nathaniel Berthon, Pipo Derani, Loic Duval
The (currently) one-off addition of the second (#3) Rebellion was a pleasant post-prologue surprise. That adds to the single full-season car at a race where the Swiss-flagged team scored their only win of last season, after inheriting a 1-2 following the exclusion of both Toyotas after post-race scrutineering found ride height plank damage.
The confirmed full-season car is the #1 with Bruno Senna and Gustavo Menezes joined by the mercurial Norman Nato, making for a trio that should get the best out of the package.
The late addition, currently for this race only, of the #3 car sees another very capable trio. Nat Berthon knows the car well having contested the final three races of the ‘Super Season’ whilst both Pipo Serani and Loic Duval have added real world-class steel to the spine of the operation.
Here’s hoping the funds can be found for the two-car effort to continue, the prospects of that though look pretty remote.
Team LNT Ginetta – Ginetta G60-LT-P1 AER
#5 – Charlie Robertson, Egor Orudzhev, Ben Hanley
#6 – Mike Simpson, Oliver Jarvis, Guy Smith
The new boys are looking to make a splash on home ground, after a disaster in the first season with the stumbles over Mecachrome and a backer for its customer team that caused frustrations all round. Lawrence Tomlinson has stepped up, invested in his vision, and revived Team LNT together with a technical partnership with AER.
The cars have been fast, very fast, in testing, but their race-readiness is an almost entirely unknown factor.
The known factors are: The chassis, looks a peach, the engine (AER’s latest spec P60C) is powerful and now more reliable than ever, and the drivers are more than capable. For this weekend the G60s will be driven by a mix of Ginetta stalwarts Mike Simpson and Charlie Robertson, proven current LMP1 talent in ex-SMP Racing man Egor Orudzhev, ex-DragonSpeed LMP1 man Ben Hanley and ex-Audi LMP1 and current Mazda DPi man Oliver Jarvis.
Jarvis is a late replacement for the injured Chris Dyson, so for Silverstone, we’ll miss out on the Dyson Racing band reunion, 2003 Le Mans winner Guy Smith, together with race engineer Peter Weston will though be on parade.
There will be a big home crowd boost for the effort and the addition of the pair is very good news indeed for a somewhat beleaguered LMP1 class in the transitional year before Hypercar. The ambitions are very high indeed here, but every single piece of the picture will have to sit together perfectly in the inherent speed of the package is to result in the desired outcome on the results sheet.
It’s going to be a lot of fun seeing how this one pans out.
Toyota Gazoo Racing – Toyota TS050 HYBRID
#7 – Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi, Jose Maria Lopez
#8 – Brendon Hartley, Sebastien Buemi, Kazuki Nakajima
The Toyota’s crushing domination of proceedings through the ‘Super Season’ remained unchallenged through a combination of astounding pace and efficiency, iron-clad reliability and a ruleset with an inbuilt set of advantages increasingly confusingly dealt out to what was already the utterly dominant package.
Whilst the current season again sees an aerodynamic step forward for the TS050, the days of assured dominance may be numbered with a substantially less skewed EoT.
All inbuilt fuel stint and pit time advantages have been removed, the Toyotas will now take a second longer to fuel than the non-hybrids to offset the super-rapid electric start of the Toyotas, saving a second per stop by dint of not having to crank the engine!
And the Toyotas have received additional weight since Le Mans too, they now sit at 932kg, 14 kilos up from Barcelona’s Prologue test, which was itself 14 kilos up from the final round of last season.
The latest change sees the TS050s running at 108 kg heavier than the pair of Rebellion Racing R13 Gibsons, and 99kg heavier than the Team LNT Ginetta G60-LT-P1s.
Whilst that is likely to see the Toyotas having non-hybrid competition much closer in qualifying and single lap race pace, their hybrid-boosted performance is still likely to hold a significant advantage in traffic and initial acceleration despite the additional weight.
Aside from the performance aspects of the picture the other big headline for the Toyota effort is the departure after a single season of Fernando Alonso, and the arrival of ex Porsche LMP1 and Toro Rosso F1 man Brendon Hartley.
That’s likely to be a very positive factor for the team in every aspect other than the wider media interest garnered by Alonso, Hartley’s speed is still very strong and his understanding of what it takes to squeeze the best out of a hybrid LMP1 is unlikely to have been dimmed much by his F1 adventure.
