Despite being outperformed by the rest of the GT field in a genuinely thrilling 2016 6 Hours of Spa last weekend, the 911 RSR found itself en route to a GTE-Am podium finish. The 911 was denied its well deserved result when an LMP2 car crashed into Patrick Long, minutes from the chequered flag.
The race had gone well for Pat, team leader Khaled Al Qubaisi and David Heinemeier Hansson. The team had worked its way up to second in the Abu Dhabi Proton GTE-AM RSR, with Long looking good for a podium finish. Thirteen minutes from the end of the six-hour race, an LMP2 prototype put a move on the Porsche, which ended in tears for the Proton Racing challenge.
Long holds back the best Irish swear words
“That was a rough end to an otherwise great week at Spa,” said Long, showing impressive f-word restraint. “In the final stint, I was able to overtake the AF Ferrari for P2 and we were set on just bringing it home, on a day when we didn’t have much for the winning Aston Martin. With three laps to go, an LMP2 car had a failure of brakes – or brain – and cleaned me out, snapping the right front suspension. It’s tough to accept after the weekend that my teammates David and Khaled had – they were nothing short of spectacular the entire race. But, onto the 24 Hours of Le Mans.”
“This is unfortunate really as the whole team had worked very hard for this result the entire weekend,” said Al Qubaisi. “However, we are taking away many positives from the Spa campaign and we will continue to push for the rest of the season.”
The team now looks forward to the 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 18-19. Al Qubaisi finished second in class in 2014 and Patrick Long finished second in last year’s edition. As is often the case when Belgium stays dry, the RSR’s pace was nothing special at Spa, so we’ll have to see how it goes at La Sarthe. The factory drivers are keeping a positive mindset.
Porsche 911 RSR too slow in Spa
“The balance of our 911 RSR was better than in practice, but the warm weather didn’t play into our hands,” said reigning FIA WEC GT champion, Richard Lietz. “We did everything we could, but we still weren’t fast enough. Only as the temperature cooled towards the finish did our performance improve.” Michael Christensen echoed his sentiments, taking comfort in the quick pit stops from the works team at Spa. “In the run to Le Mans, every race kilometre and every pit stop is important. That’s the positive outcome of a race in which unfortunately we weren’t able to yield what we had planned.”
Earl Bamber, Nick Tandy and Nico Hulkenberg took a determined victory at Le Mans last year, preparing for the 24 Hours of Le Mans by racing the number 19 919 LMP1 Hybrid at the 2015 6 Hours of Spa Francorchamps. It was the first time that a third 919 had been run in a round of the FIA World Endurance Championship.
Last year’s Le Mans winners will not drive the Porsche 919 LMP1 Hybrid this year. Following the Volkswagen dieselgate scandal and the subsequent pressure to slash unnecessary costs within the VW Group, Porsche reduced its WEC LMP1 squad to two cars only for the season.
Earl Bamber impressed at Spa Supercup 2014
Bamber arrived in the Ardennes as a works team rookie, but had strong form in Belgium. The previous year, the talented New Zealander had taken the first pole of his first real season in global Porsche racing at Spa, nicking the Porsche Supercup pole by three-tenths of a second ahead of seasoned Supercup veteran and current Aston works driver, Nicki Thiim. Bamber dominated the race and took a memorable win for the Fach Auto Tech team, part sponsored by Porsche as the winner of the Porsche International Cup Scholarship. No doubt his performance at the circuit in changeable conditions was a sizeable ingredient in earning a works driver contract for 2015.
“I love this circuit, as it is a spectacular place,” said Bamber from the 919 garage in 2015. “I am so looking forward to taking the 919 through Eau Rouge and can’t wait to race that car. When the Silverstone race was on I was glued to the screen: it was one of the best races I have ever seen. It was like a six-hour Supercup race. I enjoyed working with Nico and Nick in testing and now I’m really looking forward to racing with our car crew for the first time.”
Spa WEC with the Porsche 919 LMP1
The race was a turbulent affair. A stunning qualifying performance from Tandy put the car second on the grid for his 919 debut, but, on lap seven, the 919 was involved in a collision with one of the 911 RSRs and was forced to stop for repairs. Hulkenberg then double-stinted form ninth overall, and handed the car to Bamber at the 80-lap mark. Tandy brought the car home sixth overall after fitting tyres to the left side of the car only in his final stop.
The overall weekend evidenced a phenomenal chemistry between the rookie trio, who delivered a gritty performance to forge formidable bonds, which eventually led to a great result for the team at Le Mans. It’s a real shame that they will not get the chance to defend their title this year (albeit Nico can’t do it anyway due a clash with F1).
Onboard Spa Francorchamps with Earl Bamber in a Porsche 919 LMP1 Hybrid
This in-car footage shows just how tight Spa is when racing an LMP1 car on track with the wide-arched GT cars. It is surprising just how much much of the lap is flat out: Eau Rouge, Radillon, most of the downhill run from Rivage onwards and even Blanchimont are taken with foot pinned to the throttle stop. This lap is run nowhere near the 919’s ultimate pace but it’s still impressive. This year’s 6 hours of Spa Francorchamps is on May 7.
Nick Tandy and Patrick Pilet took the first win of the 2016 IMSA Racing season for the Porsche 911 RSR on Sunday, but only after a move by team mate, Fred Makowiecki, pushed the leading Corvette off the victory trail. This left Corvette driver, Tommy Milner, and a truckload of ‘Vette fans on social media not very happy at all.
‘Vette driver vents
“I just got wrecked basically,” said Milner. “Two Porsches running nose to tail… it is pretty clear what happened there. It is pretty disappointing that this is the kind of racing we have here, where we are better than that for sure.
“[Being taken out] is disappointing but certainly could have been a lot worse. I don’t mind finishing second if it is clean and it happens the right way, but that wasn’t the right way. It hurts a little bit to be second in this case the way it happened, but again, end of the day second place is great points for us. We can hold our heads high that we raced as hard as we could today, the right way.”
The Corvette fan comments on the above Youtube video are not too surprising:
“Seems to be a common occurrence with the Porsche’s “missing” their braking points when the ‘Vettes are around.”
“The Porsche team needs to be disqualified. No words can explain how disgusted I am from seeing this type of dirty racing.”
“First time I saw it I thought maybe I’d have another look and Freddy probably just got excited thought he’d go for the win. But then I watched it again. Looks damn deliberate and looks like Tandy knew it was coming too or he would have been in it.”
“Porsche playing dirty as usual. I expect that from a company that makes cars with IMS design flaws.” (lol)
“It was completely deliberate. When you see it from the overhead view it’s obviously a dick move to get Porsche team the win.”
Fred takes blame: tidy Tandy takes win
“After two third places we finally had every opportunity to win today, but we didn’t use it,” said Fred. “The first blow was the penalty for being too fast in the pit lane. The collision in the penultimate lap was my fault: I was a touch too optimistic heading into the corner.”
“That was a fantastic race,” said Nick Tandy (below). “Despite the minor setbacks, we never gave up, we believed in ourselves, and we fought to the flag. Our victory was well earned. We’ve had so much bad luck this season, so now it was our turn to shine.”
Things happen in the heat of the moment in racing, when drivers are trying to pass the car in front while simultaneously fending off another car jammed up their tailpipes. In this case, the chasing car was a Le Mans winner and team mate in an identical 911, who was in no way inclined to hold station. The notion that Fred crashed into a Corvette to deny himself victory while giving Tandy yet another Porsche win makes no sense. The Porsche claim that Fred thought he saw a split-second gap and pointed his car towards it? More likely and the stewards clearly agreed or he’d have been out. Bad news for the Corvette, but 911s have been denied victory for less many times in the past.
There are plenty of quick Porsche juniors coming through the ranks getting ready to race, and it’s about time Porsche started testing young female drivers, so small wonder that works pilots are pushing hard to shove their cars into every gap possible. Of course we like Porsches to win, but put Tandy, Pilet (above) or Bamber in Corvettes and I’d be happy to see any of them finishing first. They are just racers, plain and simple. Winning by being there, ready to make the most of every opportunity is what matters to these guys.
I know a lot of Porsche fans have Corvettes in the garage (looking at you for one, Mr Gagen) – be interested to get your viewpoint.
Opened my emails yesterday morning to find a late-night message from the Yorkshire Bullet: Mark Bates from EB Motorsport. “Testing at Silverstone with Tuthills tomorrow, come over for a catch up if you’re free.” Five minutes later, I had thrown on a Tuthill top and was in the Cayenne, en route to Silverstone.
After eleven sunny Northamptonshire miles, I arrived at the circuit and found the garage but no sign of Tuthills. Instead, Mark was there with top man Neil Bainbridge from BS Motorsport and a smart RSR in Brumos colours. Tuthills had asked Mark to come down and test drive the RSR with the owner (who also owns a few Tuthill-built cars), trying the setup and suggesting some tweaks ahead of the car’s first outing this year for the CER race at Spa Francorchamps.
After many race miles in the two EB 3-litre racecars and the super 1965 911 that did so well at Goodwood last year, Mark is an excellent 911 test driver and has previously set up a number of non-EB 911 race cars, for circuits in the UK and Europe. He jumped at the chance to try an original RSR, making a five-hour round trip to have a go. The great weather was a real bonus.
Having already made a few misguided assumptions that morning, why hold back and break the habit of a lifetime, so I shot straight into another one, assuming this was the replica Brumos car built by Tuthills a few years ago, now fitted with BS Motorsport 3-litre power. Asking the owner about the new engine’s recipe, he smiled and put me straight. “This is the RSR that won the 1973 Mexico 1000 kms.”
Brumos Porsche 911 RSR 911 360 0865
Chassis number 911 360 0865 was delivered to Peter Gregg at Brumos in April 1973 (happy 43rd birthday). Fitted with the 911/72 engine – a naturally aspirated 2808cc flat six making 308 bhp at 8k rpm – the car was sold to Mexico’s Hector Rebaque, who owned it until mid 1977. In the years he had the car, Hector took three wins in Mexico City, twice on the famous 1000 kms race.
After Hector, the car went to Guatemala for a while, eventually ending up with our friends at the Blackhawk Collection, who sold it back to Europe: first living an Italian collector for twenty years, and then to another Porsche collector in Monaco, who had it restored by the now-defunct Scuderia Classica at the start of this decade. I don’t yet have the full story of how the current owner came to possess it, but watch this space.
The track day was organised by my next-village neighbours at Goldtrack, who run a tight ship and bring in some very nice cars as a result. Parked up amongst the latest supercars and plenty of race machinery, this air-cooled classic Porsche turned few heads beyond the cognoscenti, until Bates turned the key and got the engine started.
Porsche 911 Track Day Noise
Even with tailpipe extensions, intended to mute the exhaust a touch for track day dB meters, this Porsche has a proper bark on startup. The engine has a tight, pursed tickover that is so much sweeter than the all-bass soundtracks of later Porsches sporting exhaust systems apparently designed originally for industrial chimneys. I feel an audiophile comparison of most attractive tickovers coming on.
Rolling out into the pitlane, the roofline of the tall RSR runs well above the massed Radicals, Ginettas and Scuderia Ferraris that dominate Silverstone’s start-of-race-season track days. But with 300 bhp pushing less than 1000 kilos along, it goes down the road rather nicely.
“I’ve already spun it once,” Bates confesses. “Fourth lap, pushed a bit too hard and the back just came around. It’s not what our car would have done.” I asked him what else felt different to his own 3.0 RSR build, which has proved so successful in historic racing in the seven years he’s been racing it, winning back-to-back Masters Historic titles and last year’s Nürburgring Trophy race (rumour has it that Germany’s cancelled the race now the English have won it).
Porsche 911 RSR 2.8 vs 3.0-litre
“They are quite different cars. Ours feels sharper after so many years of development. It’s lighter – closer to 920 kilos than the 970 or so of this one – so our brakes bite harder and suspension has a bit less to do. It’s not quite surgical in its precision, as no air-cooled car could ever be surgically precise, but our car is very sharp and reactive to drive. This one feels authentic to the period: very 1970s.”
Testing went well, with the RSR showing a clean pair of heels to most modern machinery. It flew past me on the old pit straight, holding its own against a featherweight Radical and shrugging off modern 991 GT3 RS and new BMW M3s. The delight in seeing real RSRs used with such glorious abandon – the owner encouraging Mark to thrash it and see what it is utimately capable of – was a joyous experience. Ultimately, it was left to Mark to decide how hard he drove it.
A video posted by The Cult of Porsche (@cultofporsche) on
“It’s not my car and we’ve already been ticked off for noise and told to keep it under 7k rpm, but there’s enough going on to see what could be looked at. Our car runs lower gear ratios, which offer more opportunies to exploit the engine’s torque. We have some suspension tweaks specific to our car and this year we also have our own dyno-developed exhaust system coming. That makes a difference to the power on tap.”
“It’s been a good morning and we’ve learned quite a bit, changing tyre pressures and moving some ballast around,” said Neil, who has extensive personal experience of racing 2.8 and 3.0-litre RSRs. When I suggested that he may have been one of the last people to race a proper 2.8 RSR around Silverstone in period (not including club races and historics since then), he had a think before sharing a great story of racing a non-turbo RSR against an Autofarm 934 back in the day. But that’s a tale for another time.
The Porsche 919 LMP1 Hybrid was gifted a win at the opening round of the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) season after the actual race winning Audi R18 was excluded in post-race scrutineering due to an excessively worn skidblock.
The skidblock under the front of Audi’s latest WEC challenger was found to be less than 20mm thick, contravening the FIA technical regulations, thereby ruling the car out of the final results. The second-placed Porsche 919 LMP1 of Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb.
Porsche WEC Crash Video
Jani had set the fastest race lap, with a time of 1:40.303: just six-tenths of a second slower than the 919’s fastest time around Silverstone over the course of last weekend, which was set by Brendon Hartley in Free Practice 2. Hartley came a cropper in the race, however, when contact with the Gulf Racing Porsche 911 of Mike Wainwright on lap 71 led to a huge accident for car number 1, which had built up a comfortable lead in the hands of Mark Webber. Both drivers escaped unharmed, but the damage to the 919 won’t be buffing out. Here’s some video:
Hartley’s post-race statement took no prisoners. “I wanted to get past a GT car on the outside, which is quite normal through there, but the driver didn’t see me and used all of the road. I don’t want to blame anyone, it was a shocking moment and a true shame.” The stewards saw the cause of the crash rather differently, laying the blame with Brendon while noting: “you are reminded that LMP1 drivers are liable for the way they overtake slower cars such as LMP2 and especially LM GTE cars.”
Sixth position in GTE-Pro was the best the 911 RSR could manage after problems with a pit stop. The Ferraris of Rigon/Bird and Bruni/Calado came home first and second, followed by Turner/Sörenson/Thiim in the Aston, with a brace of Ford GTs making up the top five. In six hours of racing, the 911 RSR of reigning GT champions, Michael Christensen and Richard Lietz, clocked up 154 laps versus the wining Ferrari’s 167 laps overall: a sizeable gap to the front. We’ll have to see how the season pans out: Porsche is holding station with customer teams only for the old 991 while the new 911 racecar is in development.
The next race on the 2016 WEC Calendar is the 6 hours of Spa Francorchamps on May 7. The 911 should do well if it rains in Belgium.
The 2016 World Endurance Championship has officially kicked off with the recent two-day ‘Prologue’ warm-up event at Paul Ricard. Porsche brought both 2016 919 LMP1 Hybrids to the circuit, covering a total of 2,197 kilometres.
Drivers Romain Dumas, Neel Jani, Marc Lieb ran their car on day one, with reigning World Champions, Timo Bernhard, Brendon Hartley and Mark Webber taking their turn on day two. Each session finished with a Porsche 919 Hybrid leading the time sheets. The overall fastest lap was set by Brendon Hartley.
“It was trouble-free running for both our new cars,” said Fritz Enzinger, Vice President LMP1, “and we have received positive feedback from our drivers. Therefore we are confident for the opening round at Silverstone on April 17. Only there it will be possible to judge the overall competition.”
“Running two cars was a good dress rehearsal for the team before the first race,” said Team Principal, Andreas Seidl (above). “The drivers have done a lot of testing during recent weeks but at the Prologue they were facing on-track traffic for the first time since last year’s finale. By the end of the two days, we had achieved the targets we had set ourselves in terms of season preparation.”
2016 FIA WEC Calendar
The 2016 WEC season starts at Silverstone later this month, kicking off nine races in total: Le Mans at 24 hours and eight more six-hour events. Mexico is a new race for 2016, with the rest of the calendar mirroring last year. “We are proud to have maintained the level of stability in the four years of the WEC,” said Pierre Fillon, President of ACO. “The time is right to expand the WEC, and the nine-race calendar allows us to continue to build the tradition of six-hour events. Of course, the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans is the race that everyone knows about and wants to compete in, but the legend is now being extended to the six-hour races as well and moving into countries with strong historic links to endurance, such as Mexico City.”
The 2016 FIA WEC calendar is as follows:
17 April: 6 Hours of Silverstone, UK
07 May: WEC 6 Hours of Spa, Belgium
18/19 June: 24 Hours of Le Mans, France
24 July: 6 Hours of Nürburgring, Germany
04 September: 6 Hours of Mexico City, Mexico
17 September: 6 Hours of Circuit of the Americas, USA
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