Jox Jottings Silverstone FIA/WEC Overture

The Overture..

So the 2013 Season is up and running and it all looks rather promising for us ‘Endurance’ racing fans.
Something strange has happened to GT racing over the winter. Suddenly most of the premier GT Championships have substantial, rather classy grids and it hard to explain quite why this is… various economies are still in deep and dire sticky stuff which seems at least as bad if not worse than last year so where has the money and confidence come from? Let us not complain because here we are at Silverstone for the opening round of the 2013 FIA World Endurance Championship with a healthy grid of 31 Cars. Also here at Silverstone are the ELMS cars at the last count there were 23 of them. It is definitely a ‘them and us’ sort of event with the WEC cars languishing in the Wing ( F1 Paddock) and the ELMS tucked away up in the ‘old’ F1 paddock. For open wheel aficionados the FIA European Championship are here as well so it is an impressive programme.
Back to the boom in Endurance Racing.. possibly even more amazing than the support the FIA and ELMS are getting is the burgeoning ‘Blancpain’ Endurance Series which currently boasts around 60 entries!

The home for LMP1 and LMP2 however remains with FIAWEC and ELMS. The big guns are here on the Six Hour grid in the shape of two Audi R18 e-tron quattros and two Toyota TS030 Hybrids. For ‘conventional ‘ fans the evergreen Rebellion Lolas are here alongside the Strakka Racing HPD 03c. As far as the ELMS grid is concerned there are no real surprises except maybe the arrival of the Alpine Nissan. This is basically an Oreca 03 under the skin but named ‘Alpine’ as part of the plan to build the brand’s motor sport credibility ahead of the Alpine-Caterham sports car’s arrival in 2016. It will be run by  the well established Signatech team.

Rather surprisingly Audi are here with new cars while Toyota are relying on their 2012 machines plus some serious development.  LMP2 looks pretty familiar except for the arrival of two Lotus Praga T128 cars from the Czech Republic. During free practice it did rather look as if their test programme was still ‘work in progress’. At the end of free practice they were languishing 25th and 29th out of 31 cars.

In LMGTE Pro ( catchy title eh?) the new Porsche 911 RSR has broken cover, sort of! It is new shape 991 body shell from the soon to be launched but the engine is from last year’s model because the road car has yet to be homologated. Still with me? As is often the case the car is not entered under the Porsche AG factory banner but by Manthey. However the true picture emerges when you see the driver line up. All six drivers are fully paid up Porsche works drivers! Bergmeister, Bernhard, Dumas, Leib, Lietz and Pilet! Now that is a serious team !
When we arrived the sun was out and the sky was blue.. might not stay that way .. but it is a start.