United Autosports team principal Richard Dean and WRT founder Vincent Vosse criticised the 20-minute stop-and-hold penalty to be taken by six P2 teams in opening free practice for his weekend’s Le Mans 24 Hours round of the World Endurance Championship round.
Together with a third team boss, who asked not to be named, they argued that the penalty dished out to the Vector Sport, AF Corse, TF Sport/Racing Team Turkey, TDS Racing/Tower Motorsports, Duqueine Racing and Nielsen Racing teams should have been much sterner.
The six teams were all sanctioned for running the sensors on their ORECA-Gibson 07s during the Test Day, which “gives a sporting advantage to the competitor” according to the stewards’ bulletins confirming the penalties.
Dean and Vosse argue that the gain in running the front and rear sensors, which map the ride height of the car over the course of a lap, outweighed the loss of track time imposed by the stewards.
“The information they gained is massively valuable and is going to be of massive benefit through the rest of the week — it’s huge,” Dean told Motorsport.com. “Giving them a 20-minute hold in free practice is a weak penalty.
Vosse echoed Dean’s comments, adding: “It’s a big gain in terms of the data you collect.”
“Maybe if we had known the the penalty was only going to be a 20-minute stop-and-hold we would have run lasers.”
Three of the six teams approached by Motorsport.com described the presence of the two ride-height lasers on their ORECAs in terms of an oversight or a mis-reading of the regulations, at the same time playing down the gains involved.
Vector team principal Gary Holland said: “It was an error on our side because we had been testing with the car at Aragon to get in some high-speed running and for some reason the sensors weren’t taken off the car.
“It was our mistake, so we fully accept the penalty.
“But it’s not a huge gain at all: we see it as a validation tool because everyone is running load cells on the push rods and damper potentiometers, plus of course everyone has a lot of historic data.
“The 20 minutes we are going to lose in FP1 is a severe penalty, and that’s not counting the track time we lost when we were told to take the sensors off under supervision during the Test Day.”
TDS boss Xavier Combet, whose team has linked up with Canadian entrant Tower for Le Mans, explained that the cause of the error resulted from the lasers being legal in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in which he is running two P2s this year.
TF boss Tom Ferrier called his team’s use of the sensors as a “misinterpretation of the rules”.
“We don’t think it is much of a gain and we’d certainly prefer to have those 20 minutes of track time in practice,” he added.
Teams can run the sensors, which are not part of the homologation of the car, in private testing.
Dean underlined the value of the data they can provide when he revealed that United undertook testing on an airfield with the sensors to simulate the high-speed running at Le Mans.
