…that extra bit you squeeze into your tank every time you pit at Le Mans.
Huge clamour this week over the DQ of the class-winning Ford GTE-Am class Keating Motorsports #85 entry for Jeroen Bleekemoelen at Le Mans.
Post race, the car was found to have a tank about 100 ml over its homologated capacity and was stripped of its title.
Cue huge waves of comment on how unfair it is, that it was only 100 ml, that it wasn’t a racing advantage.
Cue Bill Ford accepting the DQ with good grace and moving on to other topics. Ford’s an interesting beastie at times like this, they have an old fashioned automaker’s sense of honour about such things.
Now, to the issues at hand. When is 100 ml not 100 ml? When it is multiplied by the number of fuel stops made in the 24 hour race. The winning car made 23, so that’s 2300ml, 2.3 litres of lovely cool dinosaur essence. Quite a lot of fuel, even in a race car.
It turns out, too, that there is a mandated minimum time for a fuel stop – I guess to ensure nobody takes unnecessary risks cutting corners while filling the tank. The team were doing their stops up to a second faster than was legal. Again, that doesn’t sound like much, but…
Ford, the great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford, was in the Keating Motorsports pit in the closing laps of the race to congratulate Keating, who is a third-generation Ford dealer. His take on the penalty and subsequent DQ?
“We at Ford are very proud of Ben Keating and the Keating Motorsports team for all they accomplished at Le Mans,” said Ford.
“I was at the race and saw first-hand their professionalism and was thrilled by their win in the GT Am class. Ben and his team overcame some tough moments and delivered an incredible result. To have that taken away from them based on the thinnest possible margin of error is disappointing, but they can leave Le Mans with their heads held high.”
No ranting about what a travesty it was, no complaint, simply it was ‘disappointing’. No doubt Ford put some muscle into supporting Keating Motorsports, its first customer team in the category. But to their credit, that mattered less than maintaining honour and integrity.
For the record, the No. 85 car lost the class win for two infringements, one for the ‘shorting’ of fuel fill times and the second for the increase in capacity of its fuel tank. The Ford-backed #65 Chip Ganassi Racing car lost fourth in class for having an oversize fuel tank. Both cars were over by a very similar amount.
Brought together with the capacity blooper, that also adds up to a lot of time over a 24 hour race period. So that was the initial rule infringement that brought the organisers to focus more closely on the car and volume test the fuel tank.
There have been a lot of clever tweaks over the years to cram more fuel into a car in less time.
In Formula One, fuel stops go in and out of favour, and when they are part of the event the teams get very creative.
Cryo-freezing fuel to make it more dense, fine tuning the pump that pushes fuel down the hose by knife-edging the vanes, opening up the return hose so there’s a vacuum effect that sucks fuel into the car (can get messy). All these have been used in F1 and have trickled down to touring car/endurance racing. At the old Wellington Street Race I leaned against the tank side of an overseas team’s fuel rig and was shocked by how cold it was – through a NASA-style blanket of fibreglass covered by silver foil. Hmmm, I thought…
And then there’s the oldest trick in the book, well known to touring car teams – plug the tank’s main inlet and return lines, hook it up to a high pressure air-line and pump it up till it pops. Voila, a fuel tank that takes an extra litre or so, meaning you can go an extra lap on your rival if you need to. That advantage can make all the difference.
You could also big-line your fuel feed – ostensibly to minimise vapour lock but actually giving you another 100-200 ml of fuel sitting in the car and unseen when people are nosy enough to pull your fuel tank to check its actual capacity. This one’s a bit naughty but not usually spelled out in rules as it’s a hair-splitting technique and its full distance advantage hard to measure.
The ‘shorting’ of the refuelling period initially gave the winning car a 55.2 second penalty – enough to demote it to second in class. According to the FIA, the penalty was calculated by the difference in the refuelling time (0.6 seconds per stop) multiplied the number of stops the car made (23) and multiplied by four, as a penalty. Glad it was them working it out and not me!
The timing penalty handed the class win to the No. 56 Team Project 1 Porsche 911 RSR of Joerg Bergmeister, Patrick Lindsey and Egidio Perfetti. The full DQ sealed the result.
Footnote: I am reading Adrian Newey’s semi-autobiography, How to Build a Car at the moment. It’s a charming insight into a quintessentially English bloke who grew up to be one of the finest racing car designers in history – if not THE finest. In it, he makes the point that any team or designer that is not testing the edge of the regulations and says his most enjoyable times are when there is a wholesale adjustment of rules that give scope for the designers to create massive advantage.
Newey reveals he has a driver to bring him to and from work – not because he’s THAT vain but because when he’s musing on what is possible vs what is written in a rule change, he is liable to miss off-ramps and turnings and end up miles from where he meant to be!
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