Category: News

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…

Is Porsche thinking on getting back to prototype racing? At Le Mans?

According to Motorsport.com, that might be a possibility. If so, Porsche is considering the new LMDh class, that supposedly should start in 2021. Nobody knows much about this new class, but basically it will allow the same car to compete both in WEC and IMSA races. Everything is on hold right now because of the pandemic, but if Porsche is actually thinking about it, maybe there’s hope for the future of endurance racing.

T.50

So far no pics, only a rendering, and not much to see. But Gordon Murray (yes, that Gordon Murray) is working on a new supercar. Not much has been revealed, it’s called T.50 and will be powered by a ground-breaking V12 from Cosworth. According to their website it will be naturally aspirated and deliver 650 hp. It will also be the “highest-revving engine ever in a production car”. From their website you can see the engine actually being tested, so I think the T.50 will actually come to life. Très cool! 😎