Category: News

And now Porsche will also be back to La Sarthe!!!

Only in 2023, but then we will have a Porsche LMDh (Le Mans Daytona hybrid) car! I read the news on Jalopnik this afternoon, when they posted a link to Porsche’s Twitter page. According to both sources, Porsche will indeed be back to La Sarthe, with a brand new 1000 kg hybrid car with around 680 hp of power. After all the bad news lately with the LMH (Le Mans Hypercar) class, I confess I was feeling a bit bleak about the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But with the recent good news coming from Audi and Porsche, things look a lot brighter.

Audi back to La Sarthe?!?

Yep, looks like it! According to Jalopnik, earlier today the manufacturer announced that it would be back at Le Mans. They will build a new LMDh car and starting in 2022 will compete in the WEC and IMSA series. So far Audi is the only big name confirmed for the new LMDh class at La Sarthe, but we can hope it will not be the only one.

Fingers crossed! 🤞

I’m in love!

On this 18th Lamborghini officially revealed the new Huracán STO. The STO (Super Trofeo Omologata) is basically a street legal version of the Huracán Super Trofeo, Lamborghini’s model for their exclusive championship series. Based on the regular Huracán Evo, the STO uses the same V10 engine and chassis. Obviously though, the STO is lighter and more powerful.

I think it looks A-W-E-S-O-M-E and I really wish one of the nice (and affordable) brands release it in 1:43 😍

This looks nice

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the cars from Maranello, but I have to say this looks pretty good. It’s a Monza SP1, customized by Novitec. Ferrari only produced 500 of them, between the SP1 (monoposto) and SP2 (two places). I talked about them in 2018 when they were first released, but now Novitec made some improvements. And the SP1 looks mighty fine.

Was the 2020 race a “good Le Mans”?

Don’t think anyone will say it was a bad race, but it was certainly atypical. The pandemic forced it to be closed to the public, so there were no fans and only the technical pre-race events happened. The pre-race parade and all the fan events did not happen, and media coverage was limited. So all in all a very peculiar race compared to the traditional “Le Mans experience”.

Petrolicious wrote a very nice article about this year’s race, and touches exactly on those points. In the future people will look back and see 2020 as the last LMP1 race, where the TS050 won it’s third Le Mans in a row. But for us experiencing all this first hand and live, it sure was something strange.

The end of an era

Predictably, Toyota won at Le Mans this year again. With no other big manufacturer in the fight, it was just a matter of how many laps would they finish in front of the smaller teams. Granted, to win at Le Mans you first have to finish the race, and the TS050’s reliability was top-notch. Kudos to Rebellion, that managed a most deserved second place. Still, an eerie race, with the empty grand stands and only team personnel or track officials at the podium 😯.

Well, that was the last time a LMP1 car raced at La Sarthe. Next year we will see the debut of the Hypercar class, and lets hope that we will see more competition in the top class.

The new 1929 Bentley Blower is coming along

Back in October last year I wrote about Bentley making a brand new 1929 Bentley Blower. The plan was to produce 12 new cars that are exact replicas of the original model. For that, a specialized team at Crewe, in the UK, took apart the second car of the 1929 “Team Blower” and laser-scanned every single part of the car. Recently Bentley showed photos of some of the new parts already made for the prototype model.

From the images that Bentley released, the new “Continuation Series” car will look absolutely fantastic. The cars are expected to be available by 2021, and all 12 are already spoken for. As I said before, sometimes it’s really nice to be rich…

And we have a winner!

Rebel Williams Esports #1 won the first 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual! 🏆
Piloted by Raffaele Marciello (factory Mercedes GT driver), Louis Deletraz (Haas Formula 1 reserve), Nikodem Wisniewski (sim racer) and Kuba Brzezinski (sim racer), it started eighth in the grid. But slowly the team climbed up and finished in first.

In GTE, the #93 Porsche dominated the race. Piloted by Nick Tandy (Le Mans winner), Ayhancan Guven (Porsche Supercup), Joshua Rogers (Porsche Esports Supercup champion) and Tommy Ostgaard (sim racer), they took the flag. Pretty nice, since this weekend was Porsche’s 50th anniversary of their first overall Le Mans win.

Not the real thing, of course, but you know? It was cool to watch. Graphics were fantastic and the inboard filming looked like you were seeing it from a real race car.

Made me want to fire up Forza 7 on the Xbox One…