ALMS, Long Beach - Friday Night/Saturday Morning

Thoughts and Notes 

Level 5

Thank god the LMP1 battle was good in qualifying, otherwise the combined P1/P2 session would have been pretty much a joke.  It only takes two cars to have a race and from what we saw in qualifying, maybe we can have a good race up front.  The show that Dyson and Cytosport put on was so good that it really didn’t matter that they were the only cars on track.

That said, a 2-car race, over the course of the season just won’t cut it – there has to be more.  Unfortunately, with the way the regulations are now, it is basically impossible to bring up the P2 class cars and equalize them with the P1 spec cars.  That just can’t happen. Cars that are to be competitive with Dyson and Cytosport have to come from somewhere else.

That puts Level 5 in a tough spot.  It’s bad enough that they are stuck racing against themselves and they can’t come close to the P1 cars.  They are in fact even slower than the cars that they ran with last season.  Significantly slower.  There can’t have been many times that a team has spent such a nice sum of money to actually move down the ladder speed wise.

When it was first announced that Level 5 was not going out to qualify, the first thought was that they wanted to maybe save their cars for the race – not risk them in qualifying.  That doesn’t really make much sense.  Here is the best chance for them to get a clear track in order to see where they are and they don’t take advantage of it.  Then there was the thought that maybe they didn’t want to go out and show that they were indeed slower than the PC cars – cars they know very well, have raced them successfully last season.

John Dagys, from SpeedTV.com wrote that the reason for not going out was two-fold and political.  One reason was that they didn’t want to start the cars mid pack, amongst cars that were potentially quicker than theirs.  Personally, I think I’d rather start mid pack than start at the back.  Why not qualify the cars, then opt to start them from pit lane?  That would be the high road to take.  Instead they create yet another controversy – a controversy that is not needed in the series right now.

Their other reason given for not qualifying was that they now want to pull the coupe and get it ready to ship to Le Mans for the test.  Unfortunately for the team, because that is the car in which team owner Scott Tucker is nominated for taking points with, that would jeopardize his standings in the points.  

There is much more to this.  There has to be.  The root of this has to simply be a building up of frustration from the performance of the entire package.  Teams running the HPD package in Europe are frustrated too.  As the way the regs are currently written, the HPD motor is not allowed to be competitive or to actually fit into what most perceive as the proper slot for the P2 cars performance wise - between the P1 and the PC cars.

The big problem is with the way the classes are currently regulated.  The P1 cars have been slowed down, while the PC cars were given a recent restrictor break in order to keep them ahead of both the GT and the surprisingly fast in a straight line GTC Porsches.  Where does that leave room for the “new” P2?  Even at Sebring it was apparent that something was wrong when Allan McNish noted that he was having a difficult time passing on the straights and had to resort to dive-bombing tactics in the braking zones in order to get past the slower competitors.

This is very much a work in progress.  The regulations need to be tuned in order to strike the right balances.  Granted, Long Beach is an exception.  It is a totally different track than say Sebring.  Here on the street course it appears as if the lack of low end grunt is hurting the HPD turbo, when compared to the other cars on track.  Despite the change to a larger restrictor, the HPD/Lola is still struggling here.  And because of that and the decisions made yesterday, we are again writing about a distraction from the good that we saw on track.

Corvette Dealings

Friday was an interesting day to say the least for Corvette Racing.  Somewhat because of the issues in the morning session, the team chose to adopt a different approach for qualifying, which unfortunately saw the No. 3 car, qualified by Tommy Milner down in a lowly 9th place in class.  The team chose to run each of their cars with different tires compounds and then wait and see which one was the better choice – not just for qualifying, but for the race.  Just because the 3 car qualified 9th, it doesn’t mean that the experiment was a failure.

Doug Fehan - "Qualifying took place during a transitional time on the track, as will the race tomorrow.  The temperature goes from hot to cold in a hurry, so we weren't sure how the cars would react. The engineers and drivers looked at the data we got this morning, compared it with the information from last year, and together they made a great choice on chassis setup."

Jan Magnussen (who qualified 2nd in class) - "We split the strategy with the tires.  Maybe one car will benefit early in the race and the other will be better later. With two strong cars we can try different approaches and hopefully by the end of the race we'll know what works best for the final stint. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. It's a short race, but at Long Beach it's always absolutely full attack."

Milner - "It could have easily worked out that I was on the better tires for the conditions.  Corvette Racing is a team, and sometimes you have to split the strategies. I would have liked a better result in my first time qualifying the Corvette, but it was the right decision for the team and I'm all for it.  There are a lot of different scenarios for tomorrow, so we'll see how it plays out.  Long Beach is tough, it's hard to pass here, but I know our Corvette is better than a ninth place car. The fun part for me is that I'll start the race and get to pass some cars. I'm confident we can move up."

Milner also explained that it took a bit of adjustment initially to get used to racing the Corvette, when compared to the BMW he had been driving.  “Corvette Racing runs their cars a bit softer than what I’ve been used to.  It’s a team thing and it took some time for me to adapt, but now I’m used to it.  It feels natural to me.  I really appreciated the softer car at Sebring – we were able to drive our Corvettes in some places on the track that our competitors couldn’t.”

P1 Pole Revisited

Lost in the excitement of a really good battle for overall pole was the actual pace of the cars, when compared to the morning session.  In the morning street cleaning session, it was a struggle for either car to get times into the 16s.  In fact, the Cytosport Aston was not able to at all, having to settle for a 17.066.  Yet, in the afternoon, with all of the different types of rubber on the track, as well as in warmer, but dropping temperatures, both were able to drop into the 14s, with Guy Smith just missing a 13.

Smith - “I did a 16.7 this morning and my engineers told me we needed to get it down to the 14’s for qualifying and I was skeptical.  This is a credit to our engineers – on a circuit like this, you are second guessing what the track is going to be like for a qualifying session eight hours after you first ran on it. Qualifying was very close. Every time I would cross the line, Klaus would go quicker and he kept me honest the whole time. We have given ourselves a good opportunity tomorrow on a track where overtaking is difficult.”

Guy was stunning in the session – the car was visibly quick and also visually somewhat un-tidy in the corners.  He was hustling his car around in a stunning display of controlled aggression.  It was a joy to watch.

Announcements

Expect an announcement soon from a team that is conspicuous by their absence concerning activities in both May and June and hopefully other events afterwards.

Other than that, things have been pretty quiet here at Long Beach.  So here we will again take the stand that where there isn’t any news to report, we’ll make it up.  Fueled by double doubles for a late dinner, the latest brainstorm to come out of our feeble minds is a new racing class – LMP-RC. 

Brought to you by the same minds that many years ago proposed a racing series for minivans, complete with spec groceries in the back and a car seated infant, this new series (the RC stands for Roach Coach) will bring a whole new meaning to fast food.  These high tech kitchens on wheels will be racing for glory on track as well as for glory of the gastronomic kind.  The results on track will be combined with a Food Network style judging of the grub that is cooked while the race is underway.  The possibilities are endless.

Another proposal is for LMP-SUV, which will see the entire pit crew transported in the car and when they make their stop, the crew will jump out of the car, much like an orchestrated Chinese Firedrill, perform the service and then jump back in.  Coffee in the cup holders is of course mandatory…