Thanks for the info! Never thought about ease of service but it makes sense. I assume you can gain track time data/setup advantages from the time won over multiple services through quicker mechanical changes.
Yeah, actually it’s a huge deal tom that suspension is so easily accessible for setup changes. That combined with the fact that the cars can be rebuilt so fast means problems that used to be terminal are no longer terminal, and when things go wrong on practice days you can either have the car back sooner, or if it’s still really bad, by the time it’s fixed the team can still have daylight hours to fiddle with setups. Most series implement curfews before race days.
And wow the LMP2 car is small indeed! Kind of looks like an F1 car without bodywork. I had no idea it was that small.
A lot of these things are surprisingly small, f1 cars have similar footprints to modern pickup trucks, Prototypes and GTs are microscopic by comparison. I’m only 5’4”, and the top of an LMP2’s wing tip only goes roughly up to my waist. On tv it’s hard to gauge true scale of things since you don’t intuitively know how large the drivers is or how wide the track is, there isn’t immediately something to reference scale. Your eyes just go with what looks like a relatively normal sized object. That’s how you get stuff like the Big M8 and these cursed Mustang pictures:
Real:
Doctored:
Also did not know it was making its way into road cars. Honestly, if it’s safe, crash wise, this will also be great for freely (or more freely) working on the engine, for example, and it also means less to come off and put back.
Cars made out of composites like carbon fiber are a bit funky, because they don’t “crumple” like traditional metals do, so supercars are already built with crash structures similar to that used in racing. You basically have segments of carbon designed to “shatter” on impact to absorb energy and slow the car over time (in f1 it’s between the nose cone and the monocoque), or some non-structural aluminum that stands in the way of the wall or object the car is impacting, and can compress before the driver pod takes the force.
The simpler construction component of GT3s doesn’t really have an impact on that, but when you see influencers crashing their McLarens/Lambos/Porsches, it usually looks worse than it is specifically because the car was designed to “explode”, sending energy laterally before full compression and hitting the driver.
This guy hydroplaned it a bit over the speed limit, not an extreme direct impact to the guard rail, but it still looks like it had a head on impact. That’s by design. His passenger only got cuts and bruises, but that’s just from debris and the camera gear in his hands.
I think it would lower the barrier of entry to home servicing even if your main thing was “I don’t wanna have to unscrew/take apart everything and put it back together”.
They might implement some proprietary screws like Apple.
That said, usually with robust designs like this entail higher torque fastenings on everything, so it may not be something anyone can do with conventional tools. Also, road cars will have additional electronics systems for windows, safety functions, sensors, and additional hardware like AC and units for cooling at low speed/idle. I’d imagine some of that is put inside the negative space left in the minimalist design of the GT3 version, but in general cooling solutions need to be planned out a lot differently on road vs race cars because of how different the conditions those cars are. Race cars overheat at idle, and are literally cooled by fast moving air, while many road going sports cars need additional cooling mods to be tracked for extended periods of time, despite being able to keep the engine and driver cool in traffic. It’s actually insane how large cooling reservoirs are on Huracans and GT3RSs.
Mid-engine race cars usually add more radiators where the “frunk” storage space used to be, I’m not completely sure how and where FR race cars add and expand their cooling solutions in the racing version, I don’t think anything is installed in the rear like and inverse MR would be.
