ILMC, Zhuhai – Friday Notes From The Paddock

There’s gossip aplenty as befits the time of the season but with the calendar still not announced few teams have finally firmed up their programmes.

We’re expecting a 5 race LMS calendar to include two circuits so far not to have hosted an LMS race – that announcement may come as early as tomorrow – more likely next week.

There will be more news too in the coming days and weeks on LMP2 interest in the WEC – no news yet on level 5’s continued involvement (or not!) but there are other potential high profile programmes under very active discussion.  Expect too an increased level of LMP2 interest in ALMS (not that that would be difficult!)  Expect too some interesting developments in terms of the key technical details amongst a number of teams in LMP2 in both series.

The fire for the #65 Lotus during the first session here was apparently caused by race tape debris in the fuel tank blocking the breather and causing a fuel blowback – the tape though was “not of a colour we recognise!” Let’s hope we don’t have a fuel contamination issue here!

Olivier Lombard is here taking a day off from a trip to Hong Kong to take a look around, the every helpful circuit staff responded beautifully to being informed that the ticketless LMS race winner was from the Championship winning team, the young lady at the Welcome Centre escorted Olivier in personally – Zhuhai’s staff have again pulled out the stops to make the ILMC family welcome (Silverstone take note!!!)

Meanwhile from No word yet on who will feature in the 2012 Greaves Motorsport line-ups in WEC, LMS and at Le Mans but with rumours suggesting a very famous name will feature at Le Mans at least with a later generation of the same family perhaps forming part of the full season plans in LMS – For WEC – watch this space.

In GTE this will be the last ILMC/ WEC race for BMW, the factory’s attention will be firmly on DTM next season with drivers and technical staff heading in that direction.

In Porsche land it will all be about the factory’s ability to supply 2012 cars in good time – We expect the Falken announcement of a 2012 car to be followed by news soon of the remainder of the first batch of new cars and that Flying Lizards and Felbermayer Proton will be the other recipients.

The aggressive ‘wide fender’ look of the new 997 RSR meanwhile is set to be duplicated by a 2012 spec Corvette as all the major GTE teams follow the lead of the Ferrari 458, a waiver initially given to the Ferrari is now incorporated into the overall GTE rules.

GG