The WEC LMP1-H teams have been doing private testing for some time now. With the exception of Nissan, who has been surprisingly open about their car's development, I think it might be easier to break into NORAD then it is to to find hard testing data for LMP1 cars. That being said, the teams have homologated their cars for the season, and we have a little bit of test data from Paul Ricard to look at, so just like we did for the Formula 1 teams a couple of weeks ago, let's do some uneducated guess work and see if we can rank the LMP1-H teams from best to worst.
1). Porsche
If you don't love the Porsche 917, please stop reading and leave right now. As you can probably guess then, I was pretty excited to here that Porsche was returning to Le Mans with a factory LMP1 effort last year. Porsche obviously had a good year with the 919 in 2014, winning the race Brazil and claiming a number of pole positions. The car obviously had speed, but it's major flaw was that the car had midturn understear problems. As a result, the 919 chewed through tires at a pretty good clip. I'm just a guy with a blog, but I'm pretty sure that in endurance racing you want a car that's good on the long run. While Porsche had speed, their tire wear problems hurt their finishing position. The lap times at Paul Ricard again suggest that the 919 is going to be one of the fastest cars on the track, and earlier in the year Porsche claimed that they fixed the car's balance problems. If Porsche really can manage their tires better in 2015, then they will have the car to beat.
2). Toyota
Picking the strongest car for this list was fairly easy, as was picking the weakest car (five bucks says that the most common words we hear during this year's WEC championship will be "and Nissan continues having problems as they bring their car back into the garage"). The middle positions are bit of a toss up however. Based on lap times at Paul Ricard, Audi had the faster car, but Toyota is the defending WEC champion. Plus, even though Toyota was slower at Paul Ricard, they still have a 6MJ hybrid system, while Audi has a 4MJ hybrid system. As I explained in excruciating detail yesterday, 2014 race results indicate that the key to speed with the LMP1-H cars is running in the higher hybrid sub-classes. Granted, my analysis is completely neglecting aerodynamics, and essentially every other part of the car that isn't the powertrain, but the Toyota looks like it could be the better car on paper.
3). Audi
While Toyota may have the stronger car on paper, races are won and lost on the track. As the great Yogi Bera said, in theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they are different. Thank Yogi. As I said earlier, Audi appears to be at a disadvantage using only a 4MJ hybrid system. That being said, you don't win at Le Mans 13 times by accident. All the great endurance teams have one thing in common, their race craft is second to none. I'm not saying that Toyota doesn't know how to run a team, but Team Joest is probably the best in the business. Even if they don't have the fastest car on the track, they stay competitive by capitalizing on any mistake the opposing teams makes. This means that regardless of the car they are fielding, Audi can't be completely counted out from any race. Oh, and they were also faster then Toyota at Paul Ricard, so that may help as well. Although Audi is only ranked third on this list, I wouldn't be surprised one bit to see them race their way around Toyota once the season starts.
4). Nissan
When Nissan first announced the specs on their GT-R LMP1 car, a lot of people were getting ready to hand over the first place trophy at Le Mans, the WEC constructors championship, the WEC drivers championship and their virgin daughters to Nissan before the cars even took to the grid. If Nissan could have built a car to the originally advertised specifications, that might not have been a bad call (except for the virgin daughter part). Then reality hit with the force of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Okay, so the asteroid bit is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but Nissan is definitely the kid from high school who is failing to live up to his potential. Nissan isn't going to debut the car until to Le Mans, and has limited testing miles on it. By itself, that usually spells a recipe for disaster, but that's doubly true for Nissan given the cars unusual engineering. While I salute Nissan for building the weirdest car in recent WEC history, they are going to have more bugs to work out of the car then a team building a conventional layout car would. Also, the car is going to run in a strict FWD setup. Nissan says that their traction control system and superior down force are going to make front wheel drive viable, but I still think they are going to have handling problems because of it.
All is not doom and gloom for Nissan however. If their flow through aero concept lives up to it's promise, they should have really good down force numbers for relatively little drag. The end result is higher top speed on the on the Mulsanne straight. If Nissan can get their other problems sorted out, I think the GT-R LMP1 is going to be a real weapon on the track. The question is will Nissan back the program long enough for the car to develop, or, if the first two years are completely unsuccessful, will Nissan just run away, bury the car in a salt mine and pretend this never existed.
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Do you notice a little fun fact about this list. The car ranking also matches the hybrid subclass ranking of each teams. That wasn't just laziness on my part, for once. This list was developed based on what we know about the cars plus a little speculation. It just so happens that the cars in the higher hybrid subclasses appear to have a speed advantage. If we see the higher hybrid subclass cars having a distinct speed advantage in 2015, then that will deliver a simple message to all the teams. Get your car to 8MJ's, or race for second place.
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