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Watching live on MotorTrend TV!

strathconaman

Unfortunately LMP1 isn't a race and nobody cares about LMP2. It will be more interesting with the hypercars next year.

Will porsche be there?

dkraige

Seemed to me the winner in the only interesting class (GTE Pro) was fairly arbitrary based on when a safety car came out. For years they've been trying all kinds of different safety car regulations, and yet every year the race results seem to get thrown off by somebody getting artificially boosted or screwed by a safety car. It's never made sense to me that anybody should get penalized multiple minutes by where they happen to be on track when the SC comes out. A few seconds here and there, sure, because maybe one car loses out on a 200 MPH straightaway while another car loses out on 90 mph curvy bits, so it's never going to be perfectly fair, but getting screwed out of whole minutes is just wrong. I watch a lot of racing and Le Mans seems to have a disproportionate problem in this area. Between that and the fact that there's no competition in the top class, it's been a pretty boring race lately.

DBJoe996

I liked watching all the classes of cars. It was a pretty decent race, almost boring at times but it is the 24 Hours of Le Man. Gripe #1 - the MotorTrend coverage was terrible. Do they really have to prattle on every second of the race? Gripe #2 - they never seem to pay any attention to the race leaders in the other classes, just the overall leader. I always scream at the TV that there are other classes of cars...why not focus on them for a few minutes of coverage. Gripe #3 - the coverage had an inexplicable scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen so anytime I wanted to pause it to check it out my TV system banner would cover it up. Do they not have home TV's? Gripe #4 - what was up with the leader board? In some cases it would show # laps down for some cars and at the same time show hours/minutes/seconds down for other cars. How are you supposed to make sense of that? They don't show by class, just overall. That's stupid. There were some spectacular crashes. Glad no one got hurt.

RSBro

There's a decent thread we had going in the Racing forum. The feed on MotorTrend was the Eurosport feed, so that's why it sucked lol. The WEC feed is what I usually get, but I was in/out during the race so I tried it on MT this time and it was okay, I thought. Next year I'll use the app again.

Race was pretty decent, better than last year in GTE-Pro. Safety Car ultimately decided the race (again) but they did much better with the utilization of FCYs instead, keeping most of the car groupings together where possible. That Ferrari just had the speed to stay ahead of the 91 and 93 who kept battling each other. BoP was pretty spot on, even with Chevy getting their weight reduction and Porsche getting an addition. Ford shoulda gotten more juice to be competitive, given they finished 4-5-6-7, which is pretty remarkable honestly just for durability. Felt pretty gutted for AMR, but I dunno what's up with them. I know they are uber-tough on their tyres, but still. Especially with them announcing their participation in Hypercar class.

Seeing the Ford GTs in GTE-Am will be pretty awesome. Keating is from where I live, so was cool to see that car win, and Project 1 team still won the title and got 2nd. Happy with that! Dempsey-Proton wasn't on their game this year.

New season starts on Sept. 1 already! Can't wait.

Splitting Atoms

The fourth place Ford GT GTE Pro and the first place Ford GT GTE Am were disqualified/penalized for having fuel capacity slightly over the limit. The Am car held 96.1 liters when the limit was 96. The fuel filler was also slightly larger than the limit on the Am car. The fuel volume error, on at least one of the cars, was due to using weight and density to determine volume instead of measuring absolute volume. The Am car dropped to second place due to the time penalty.

z driver 88t

I feel bad for the DQ on Ford. It sucks to have such a minor glitch result in a DQ. Their mandatory 45 second minimum refueling time was off by 0.4 seconds and 0.1 L. I would be curious if over the course of 24 hours that 0.1 L added up to a measurable change. I guess over the course of 24 hours it would have have around 22 pit stops. The cumulative difference of 2.2 L or about 0.6 gallons would result in a race distance of about 2 miles. Considering the laps are over 8 miles, it's fair to say this infraction likely had nil effect on the outcome.

I understand "rules are rules" but when the effect is negligible, at least I would have thought they could keep 2nd place as their penalty.

dkraige

They definitely broke the rules, and should be penalized. The real question is why isn't this kind of stuff picked up in a PRE-race inspection instead of post-race? That way any penalties could be sorted out in the starting order, or time penalties during the first pit stop or something, and then the finish of the race would stand. Unless their fuel tank changed during the race, which has actually happened in the past. Things can change shape/size a little after 24 hours of banging over curbs. It's not clear if that's what happened here, or if it was out of spec right from the start.

RSBro

Just read about the Am Ford GT being DQ'd... hard to take no doubt, but it seems like every year now we see more and more of this, teams desperate to gain even the smallest advantage so I'm not surprised the ACO acted like they did. A Dempsey car was DQ'd during last season for similar I believe, and didn't G-Drive get DQ'd last June for the same thing after winning P2? Of course every team is going to say "I don't know how that happened" but that doesn't really fly with the organizers and other teams IMO. It's a minute amount of difference, but if the other teams could manage to not do the same, it makes you wonder...

cds72911

I don't follow this race series, but bending the rules and playing on the razor's edge of legality to gain advantage has been a feature of racing virtually forever, Teams constantly take calculated risks that they'd probably get away with their tweaks. Sometimes it helps them win. Sometimes it actually advances the sport. Other times you get caught and it sucks. I seem to recall one race where Porsche was caught out over aero violations of mm in ride height.