Author: LUWerner

We lost Neil Pert

This morning I was really sad to know that Neil Pert passed away this past Friday, January 10th. A true car guy and drummer from Rush, one of my favorite bands, he was battling cancer for three years.

Rush has too many great songs to list, but without a doubt “Red Barchetta” is my all time favorite. If you ever have the time to listen to it, pay attention to the lyrics.

The world is less bright today 😥.

When a broken engine can help you in a race

Le Mans, June 14th, 1990. Nissan Motorsports had three cars on the track, ready for the gruesome 24 hours of racing on the following Saturday, June 15th. Two of them were RC90CK and one was the older RC89CP. Mark Blundell was piloting RC90CK #24, and it was his turn at qualifying on that Friday.

Specially at high level endurance racing, there’s an equilibrium between raw power and engine lifespan. All cars can produce more power then what they race with, but their engines would not last the 24 hours. So essentially engines are detuned for reliability. However, unbeknown to Mark or the whole Nissan team, his engine was faulty. When he started his qualifying lap, the wastegate for his RC90CK’s turbo system stuck shut. That translated to instead of the optimal 700-800 hp normally produced by his 3.5-liter twin-turbo V8, the turbos were delivering in excess of 1000 hp!

Blundell’s qualifying lap in the “broken” RC90CK .

With that kind of raw power he lapped La Sarthe in an eye-watering 3m27.020s. Okay, but is that fast? If you take into consideration that the second fastest came a full 6 seconds (!!) behind, that’s unheard of. During that lap, on the Mulsanne straight he reached 383 km/h. As a comparison, the 2019’s pole position (Rebellion’s R-One AER #13) clocked 339.1 km/h in qualifying.

So unbelievably, a mechanical issue in your own engine can bizarrely be to your advantage 😲.

A Diablo at La Sarthe? Yeah, almost…

In the 90s, with everybody trying their hand at GT1 racing, Lamborghini didn’t want to miss the fun. So despite basically ZERO racing experience, they contracted French Signes Advanced Technology to build them a race car. Based on the lines of the current Diablo, they came up with the Lamborghini 132 GT1.

With a specially designed 6-liter engine delivering around 655 hp, they built one road-going example. And even got it homologated by the FIA in April of 1998. However, in September Audi bought Lamborghini and the program stopped right there.

And that was that, no Diablo at La Sarthe. What a shame! I for one would love to have a racing Raging Bull in the W-143 Garage.

Art Cars. What?

Once in a while (not often enough, in my opinion) I review an “art car”. In fact, I even started designating them with an emoticon in the car lists. But what exactly is an art car? A car immortalized in a famous painting? Or something Uber sends you if you say you’re attending a vernissage?

Not exactly. But if you have five minutes you can find out here.

And happy New Year! 👍