Did the lack of that extra power from the rear courtesy of Hybrid system affect the balance of the car in places where you have quick direction changes – such as the Porsche Curves?
“I don’t think it was affecting the balance too much, but certainly with the brake performance and acceleration off the corners we were losing time compared to where we should’ve been. Just having front wheel-drive meant the traction wasn’t fantastic, but we went there knowing that so we weren’t getting too upset about it. Next year we’ll have a completely different system which will free up the traction at the front, meaning we’ll be an absolute rocket off the corners. We’ll be the latest on the brakes and the fastest on the straights. It was important that we did the race and collected so much data. We’ve also bonded together as a group a lot more now. We went there with the right mindset to get a car home and learn as much as we could.”
Was there anything you collected in the data that has forced a re-think?
“Certainly one of the things we noticed was that all the top cars were attacking the kerbs through the whole race from start to finish. We had to stay off the kerbs which obviously affected the lap time. The car was a bit fragile and hadn’t done a 24 hour simulation before and had a few niggles here in there. But we learnt that we had to build a slightly stronger car to make sure that we could nail the kerbs for 24 hours, because there’s so much time there.
Before [the thinking was] ‘they’ll break and we won’t’, but they [the opposition] proved they could smash the kerbs and not break.
To be honest we thought we were going to get killed under brakes and we didn’t at all, so we were very happy about that knowing we’ve got a lot more to come next year. I know a lot of people were saying the Porsche Curves were going to be a nightmare, but in the end we were getting through there pretty well.”
Did you work out what you hit that caused your engine cover to get torn off? Was it a
notes from race control and a couple of minutes before car #27 SMP car was reported going slow through that sector. I’ll speak to them at the next race but it seems to line up. Hitting a 9kg tyre carcass at 200mph is obviously going to do a fair bit of damage, but it definitely wasn’t an animal because there’d be blood, guts and all sorts!”
Image: Nissan Motorsport