Nick Tandy and Patrick Pilet took the first win of the 2016 IMSA Racing season for the Porsche 911 RSR on Sunday, but only after a move by team mate, Fred Makowiecki, pushed the leading Corvette off the victory trail. This left Corvette driver, Tommy Milner, and a truckload of ‘Vette fans on social media not very happy at all.
‘Vette driver vents
“I just got wrecked basically,” said Milner. “Two Porsches running nose to tail… it is pretty clear what happened there. It is pretty disappointing that this is the kind of racing we have here, where we are better than that for sure.
“[Being taken out] is disappointing but certainly could have been a lot worse. I don’t mind finishing second if it is clean and it happens the right way, but that wasn’t the right way. It hurts a little bit to be second in this case the way it happened, but again, end of the day second place is great points for us. We can hold our heads high that we raced as hard as we could today, the right way.”
The Corvette fan comments on the above Youtube video are not too surprising:
“Seems to be a common occurrence with the Porsche’s “missing” their braking points when the ‘Vettes are around.”
“The Porsche team needs to be disqualified. No words can explain how disgusted I am from seeing this type of dirty racing.”
“First time I saw it I thought maybe I’d have another look and Freddy probably just got excited thought he’d go for the win. But then I watched it again. Looks damn deliberate and looks like Tandy knew it was coming too or he would have been in it.”
“Porsche playing dirty as usual. I expect that from a company that makes cars with IMS design flaws.” (lol)
“It was completely deliberate. When you see it from the overhead view it’s obviously a dick move to get Porsche team the win.”
Fred takes blame: tidy Tandy takes win
“After two third places we finally had every opportunity to win today, but we didn’t use it,” said Fred. “The first blow was the penalty for being too fast in the pit lane. The collision in the penultimate lap was my fault: I was a touch too optimistic heading into the corner.”
“That was a fantastic race,” said Nick Tandy (below). “Despite the minor setbacks, we never gave up, we believed in ourselves, and we fought to the flag. Our victory was well earned. We’ve had so much bad luck this season, so now it was our turn to shine.”
Things happen in the heat of the moment in racing, when drivers are trying to pass the car in front while simultaneously fending off another car jammed up their tailpipes. In this case, the chasing car was a Le Mans winner and team mate in an identical 911, who was in no way inclined to hold station. The notion that Fred crashed into a Corvette to deny himself victory while giving Tandy yet another Porsche win makes no sense. The Porsche claim that Fred thought he saw a split-second gap and pointed his car towards it? More likely and the stewards clearly agreed or he’d have been out. Bad news for the Corvette, but 911s have been denied victory for less many times in the past.
There are plenty of quick Porsche juniors coming through the ranks getting ready to race, and it’s about time Porsche started testing young female drivers, so small wonder that works pilots are pushing hard to shove their cars into every gap possible. Of course we like Porsches to win, but put Tandy, Pilet (above) or Bamber in Corvettes and I’d be happy to see any of them finishing first. They are just racers, plain and simple. Winning by being there, ready to make the most of every opportunity is what matters to these guys.
I know a lot of Porsche fans have Corvettes in the garage (looking at you for one, Mr Gagen) – be interested to get your viewpoint.
The Porsche 919 LMP1 Hybrid was gifted a win at the opening round of the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) season after the actual race winning Audi R18 was excluded in post-race scrutineering due to an excessively worn skidblock.
The skidblock under the front of Audi’s latest WEC challenger was found to be less than 20mm thick, contravening the FIA technical regulations, thereby ruling the car out of the final results. The second-placed Porsche 919 LMP1 of Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb.
Porsche WEC Crash Video
Jani had set the fastest race lap, with a time of 1:40.303: just six-tenths of a second slower than the 919’s fastest time around Silverstone over the course of last weekend, which was set by Brendon Hartley in Free Practice 2. Hartley came a cropper in the race, however, when contact with the Gulf Racing Porsche 911 of Mike Wainwright on lap 71 led to a huge accident for car number 1, which had built up a comfortable lead in the hands of Mark Webber. Both drivers escaped unharmed, but the damage to the 919 won’t be buffing out. Here’s some video:
Hartley’s post-race statement took no prisoners. “I wanted to get past a GT car on the outside, which is quite normal through there, but the driver didn’t see me and used all of the road. I don’t want to blame anyone, it was a shocking moment and a true shame.” The stewards saw the cause of the crash rather differently, laying the blame with Brendon while noting: “you are reminded that LMP1 drivers are liable for the way they overtake slower cars such as LMP2 and especially LM GTE cars.”
Sixth position in GTE-Pro was the best the 911 RSR could manage after problems with a pit stop. The Ferraris of Rigon/Bird and Bruni/Calado came home first and second, followed by Turner/Sörenson/Thiim in the Aston, with a brace of Ford GTs making up the top five. In six hours of racing, the 911 RSR of reigning GT champions, Michael Christensen and Richard Lietz, clocked up 154 laps versus the wining Ferrari’s 167 laps overall: a sizeable gap to the front. We’ll have to see how the season pans out: Porsche is holding station with customer teams only for the old 991 while the new 911 racecar is in development.
The next race on the 2016 WEC Calendar is the 6 hours of Spa Francorchamps on May 7. The 911 should do well if it rains in Belgium.
Finally resurrected my 1976 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 today. As I walked around the car while it warmed up on tickover, I noticed the road tax had run out in July 2011, so it had been parked up for more than four years. On the upside, it is now tax exempt.
Cranking the Carrera 3.0 back to life was easy enough. I had charged the new Odyssey battery up to full strength over a couple of days, swapped the terminals over from the old battery and then stuck the new one into the car, reconnecting the various positive feeds to who knows what (long time since I did all this stuff). Dropping the negative terminal on and reconnecting the battery disconnect made it ready to go.
Ignition on, fuel pump buzz, key turn, oil pressure light off. Then key off and turn – it started on the second attempt and soon filled the garage with smoke. Trying to drive it outside was an issue, as the clutch had seized on. Not ideal. I knocked it off and tried working the clutch a bit but nothing would free it. Cranking it out on the starter in first, the car started and took off for the bins. Brakes wouldn’t stop it on gravel, so I quickly knocked the key off and avoided a crash into the bins and my big trailer.
I rocked it backwards and forwards a bit in gear, wound it backwards on the starter, wound it forwards again, there was a burst of revs and the clutch was free. Saved me having to do anything brutal with a tow rope! Now the car was ready to turn a wheel, I put Ted in the 911 and took it for a quick spin around the village checking for seized brakes. All seems OK: I will book it for an MOT this week and we’ll see what it needs to pass the test and get back out there. Here’s some video:
Amongst the cool projects I’ve been party to this year is the latest reproduction from EB Motorsport: a flat-fan kit for air-cooled Porsche engines. Under development for the last two years, engineering for a flat fan kit started in the same way as most of the EB Motorsport product range: there was nothing else out there that did the job properly.
Porsche 911 RSR Turbo Replica
I’m not quite sure when EB’s Mark Bates decided he had to have a Porsche 911 RSR Turbo, but we definitely had a conversation about building a 2.1-litre Turbo replica soon after we started working together more than five years ago and the bodywork for the project is well under way (pic below). Since our first conversation, the EB Motorsport product range has expanded to include a lot of products that cross over from RSR to RSR Turbo, but the flat fan is all on its own when it comes to cool Porsche kit.
“If I could have bought a flat fan kit that looked correct and worked well at a sensible price, I wouldn’t have gone down the road of making it myself,” says Mark. “We did buy one kit but it was not what I was looking for, so we ended up doing it the long way.
Mark’s ‘long way’ would be most impossible for most of us, but nothing phases EB Motorsport. When your company has more than sixty years of experience manufacturing food-grade handling plant, including 30-metre-high composite silos that can hold tons upon tons of raw material, the minor details of re-manufacturing unobtainable throttle bodies, complex fuel pressure regulators and flat fan drives are not a big deal.
Flat Fan Components and Testing
That said, all high-end manufacturing takes time to do properly, and this has been done properly. The first step was to find a period composite fan, as making the tooling to replicate an air-cooled flat fan blade is not the work of a moment. That search came up empty handed, so a high-quality carbon fan was obtained that would hold up for testing. “Our own fan is in development, but it involves the most complex tooling we have ever designed,” says Mark. “It will take a while to get this bit right.”
The next step was the fan drive. The obvious way to recreate one of these was to buy an original 935 drive and reverse engineer it, so this is what happened. The process took six months, and the first test device was fitted to a static long block test rig earlier this year, connected to electric motors and tested for hours on end. EB measured details like noise, durability, horsepower consumption, backlash, shim dimensions and airflow with different internal diverters fitted to the custom EB fan shroud.
Flat Fan Horsepower Consumption
Testing revealed lots of interesting data, particularly in the areas of air flow and horsepower. “It’s long been rumoured that the flat fan costs a lot of horsepower due to the convoluted drivetrain, but a vertical fan will also cost horsepower,” says Mark. “Our testing proved that flat fan horsepower consumption was not linear but instead it increased exponentially. At 4k fan rpm, just 1.5 horsepower was lost, but at 12k rpm fan speed which is roughly 8k rpm engine speed, 32 horsepower was lost, mainly due to the volume of air being moved by the fan. Given the increased thermal protection to cylinders 1 and 4 offered by the flat fan installation, we’re comfortable with the test data.”
Tuthill Porsche Flat Fan 911
The video below shows the flat fan fitted to EB’s 2.5-litre ST engine on carbs, in a 911 supplied for road testing by Richard Tuthill. Tuthill Porsche will build the engine for the RSR Turbo replica and there’s even some discussion on building a short run of four RSR Turbo replicas, including EB Motorsport’s own car, all running flat fans and fun-horsepower big turbo engines. Now that would really be cool.
To read more of my work, commission my valuation expertise or hire my content generation skills, you can:
I hadn’t planned on two weeks of radio silence following Porsche’s win at Le Mans, but such was the time absorbed by Le Mans and my schedule at this time of year. Having helped eldest offspring through some important exams, restarted a garage & office building project and completed a surge of Porsche insurance valuations, two weeks had passed in the blink of an eye. Suddenly it was time to go to Belgium for the legendary Ypres Rally: round two of the Delecour/Dumas rally Porsche battle.
Round one was the Monte Carlo Rally last January. There’s no love lost between these French drivers, so bundles of needle was brought to the Alps. Dumas’ advantage with the lighter, more powerful 4-litre 997 GT3 RS over Delecour’s 3.8-litre GT3 Cup was negated on the cold icy roads of the mountains around Monaco, and it almost came down to who took more risks.
At the end of three days, Delecour emerged as the winner, but not on great terms with his rivals. Despite more than five months to go round two, there was absolutely no way that things would calm down in the interim. So it was that Team Tuthill arrived in Ypres last Monday, with a dry weather forecast and an opponent keen to redress the balance.
Imagine the tension before the rally got started, and you’ll still be nowhere near how knife-edge it was over two days of racing. Delecour is mercurial: completely electric to be around. A proven rally winner, but always in the background lies that legendary temper. Dumas is also an exceptional talent: a world-class endurance racer with pitch-perfect poise in a rally car.
These guys are at the very peak of driving ability, so watching them literally go to war in two 911s across a rally stage is incredibly powerful. FIA rally radio revelled in each driver’s desperation to know the times at the end of a stage.
In qualifying, Dumas went quickest. This gave him a nice early slot in the running, out of harm’s way amongst the ERC front runners. But as the rally got started, it was clear that running up front was a double-edged sword. Dust and gravel strewn across the roads was not being cleared quickly enough for the wide 911s.
Running straight on at a junction on stage three wiped out Romain’s early advantage and handed the lead back to François. Dumas was apoplectic on radio at the end of the stage: not the sort of talk your mother wants to hear. Delecour set a quicker time on stage four, but after that it proved impossible to stay the four-litre. Delecour dropped back down to second, and Dumas claimed the overnight lead.
With four R-GT cars entered in Belgium, Ypres was the strongest round yet for the fledgling GT rally car series. Former Ypres Rally winners, Patrick Snijers and Marc Duez, had also entered R-GT Porsches. Snijers had not been able to test his car ahead of the event, so made a slow start, but his skills soon freed up more speed.
Day two was ten stages: one hundred and seventy kilometres of rallying. The pace was absolutely flat out: none could have made those cars go any faster. On the first stage, Dumas went straight on at a junction: advantage Delecour. Until the stage end, where we found out that François had done precisely the same. The stage times were identical.
Delecour then had another small off, and Dumas stretched his lead. Then disaster for Delecour: the Porsche cut out mid-stage and could not be restarted. Eight minutes passed before Delecour and co-driver Dominique Savignoni used the proper reset sequence to get the car going and finish the stage.
Delecour in Tuthill Porsche R-GT
Victory was now out of the question, but all was not lost in the championship. The FIA R-GT Cup has the same points structure as all FIA series’ including Formula 1, so there was still plenty to fight for. R-GT leader Delecour had to keep going. Francois returned with his war colours on, chasing Marc Duez for third position. Snijers was more than three minutes ahead, but Duez could be caught with some luck.
Then, as so often happens in motorsport, the wrecking ball swung away from the chaser and back to the leader. On the penultimate stage, Dumas’ Porsche overshot a junction and went head-on into a wall of hay bales, causing immediate retirement (video below). All Delecour now had to do was finish to earn fifteen points towards his championship lead. In the end, there was no stopping François, who powered past Duez to second.
“Hats off to Romain Dumas for a lion’s drive this weekend,” said Tuthill team boss, Richard Tuthill. “We would rather have won head-to-head, but survival is all part of rallying. Second place is a good result for the R-GT championship. Our cars have taken wins in both Ypres historic rallies, so we leave here satisfied.
“Now we look towards round three: WRC Rallye Deutschland. Tuthill Porsche brought the first R-GT car to this rally last year, and we’re delighted to see R-GT growing, with four cars fighting in Ypres. This series has just started and the energy this weekend has been incredible.”
While much of the Porsche glitterati rested on its laurels in Goodwood, polishing museum exhibits and reminiscing past winners, the diehards were racing. Dumas, Delecour and the Tuthill Porsche team were flat out in Belgium. Tandy, Bergmeister and co were on the US campaign trail, and the Falken Porsche RSR claimed another Porsche win in a series it departs this year.
Winterkorn’s Volkswagen may build, sell and discount all the new Porsche luxury it can produce, but the root of this Porsche cult is in competition. That will never be lost while the real racers stick with it. Ferdinand Piëch personnifies this connection, just as his uncle did, as do Delecour, Dumas, Tandy, Enzinger and so many more. Kudos to the motorsport brethren: you are the heartbeat.
Here’s some Delecour in-car video: watch the eyes.
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