In Le Mans teammates should be the best budies and together they should be the best unit. Take one driver out and put the next one in and you can be confident that he brings the car home in one piece as you would do. And he is quick, as you are. But he is also the next competitor. Both use the same piece of hardware and the same setup.

But remeber, when you look at these pictures, that laptimes can be influenced by team order, by fuel or race strategy or tricky weather conditions. Doing it a bit slower can be way faster at the end.

Who had to work the most for the money in the factory cars.

Another interesting fact is the topspeed in Le Mans. In the past the most significant parameter, it changed a bit over the ears. Remember the question for the „Langheck“ or „Kurzheck“ Porsche 962 when the chicanes were build.

But Topspeed is still important and a look into the oficial numbers shows something quite intersting. First of all, Audi did the fastest topspeed of all. Maybe because of a good slipstream, but everyone has expected that Porsche would take the trophy or at least Toyota. But during the weekend there were rumours that Porsche had an unexpected aero-bouncing on the front and reduced laptimes and topspeed.

Toyota found themself in discussions about a strange behaving rear wing – see Mike Fullers excellent analysis – which could also be a reason for the slower speed. More likely to me is, that the Toyota driver simply lifted the food earlier to charge the supercaps.

Using hybrid technologydoes mean a different way of thinking and hybrid strategy is the key to a fast and efficient lap. The graph shows slower  Toyotas at the speed trap and Audi and Porsche close by at higher speeds. The reason why I used the percent instead of absolute numbers is the different number of laps the teams did. Unfortunatly I had to remove Audi #3 and Porsche  #20 because of faulty or too little amount of datas. Audi did the fastest topspeed reaching 339,1 km/h, while the other competitors were 5-8 km/h slower. But if you take the average of all topspeeds of a car relatively to the fastest topseed you can see a bigger difference for the Toyotas than for the Audis or Porsches. This underlines that the Toyotas could have gone faster.

This graph shows the gaps between the winning Audi #2 and the other factory LMP1 cars.

How to read this?
Negative values mean the car is infront of the Audi #2, positive they are behind.
The little ripple come from pitstopps.

What we can see is, that the Toyota #7 was in the lead all the time (as we know) until it broke down, but because the line is relativly flat, both car did very similar laptimes. A reason could be that the Toyota took it easy or both cars were very equal.

The Porsche #20 tells a different story. Over the laps the graphs is rising, because the Audi #2 was constantly faster until around lap 250, when the turbo of the #2 had to be changed, and the Audi #1 and the Porsche #20 entered P1 and P2.

Before the 2014 race, ACO and FIA installd the Slow Zones to reduce the safety car problems where others can be penalized just because the safety car came out at the wrong time. Unfortunatly the safety cars came out this year again and again some had a big gap of a few minutes. Which can easily be seen at around lap 25. There has to be something for the future!

Quick look at the laptimes.

The graph shows very clearly, that the Porsches surprisingly haven’t had the pace of the Audis and Toyotas over the distance while the Audi also surprisingly were close to the Toyota. My guess the Audis, especially #2, had to go really flatout, while the Toyota did it more easily. However at the end Audi won – again.

3:22min of André Lotterer was another surprise to me. He nailed it again.

Never underestimate Audi over the distance is something Peugeot had to learn and Toyota got the lesson the hard way, too. Will try to display that.

What a race!

I think we have seen one of the best Le Mans races of the past years and I will throw in some analysis the next days. There is one thing that impressed me when I had a quick look at the race datas:

Porsche #20 did a very clean race. Only schedules stopps and all within the same times, without the bad luck at the end, when the motor stopped working, they would have finished a good result. Audi and Toyota pitcrews did both awesome jobs. There is no difference between the two companies – always perfect work. The Porsches were always 5-10s slower. Rumours say they had problems to fill the ful cell as quickly as the others do.

To me, the pitcrews are always the heroes, who have to do perfect jobs all the time, the whole week!

 Table shows pitstop times