The FIA/WEC 2014 kicks off at Silverstone.

It is the 18th of April and the Club Arnage editorial team are at Silverstone. Yes, the WEC season has started. Le Grand Fromage, Jock and Tony are here working variously with Club Arnage and 'Live Texting' for the official FIA/WEC website. Avid readers of the motor sport press will know that a fair few things have changed.. whether for the better or worse remains to be seen.

Obviously the big news surrounds Porsche and their return to factory prototypes in Endurance Racing, their spiritual home. The general view is that they may have a bit of catching up to do, particularly as far as technology is concerned. Audi and Toyota have respectively many and several seasons under their belts but let us not under estimate Porsche.. as AA Milne might have written "this is what Tiggers are good at"!!

Some are questioning the logic of Audi and Porsche racing against each other. Up until the arrival of the Audi R8 these two VAG companies were never directly in competition with each other, they were building very different cars, aimed at very different markets. We are also led to believe that both companies are funding their racing out of their own budgets so all is fair in love and war. Whatever the case it is good to see another serious, high profile contender in LMP1.

Something has gone astray with LMP2.. it was a very healthy baby last year and it was well populated and very competitive. However it seems the original idea to contain costs did not seem to have worked well enough, plus the expense  of competing all over the world has probably not helped. This weekend there are just four LMP2 cars here, all powered by Nissan and all but one are Oreca 03 models. If you want to see P2 cars, there is an ELMS round here this weekend with eleven prototypes. So LMP2 remains popular, but not in the WEC it seems. However they will be back for Le Mans, and plenty of them.

Now lets have a go at explaining LMP1 and the wonderful world of hybrids.. not the work of moment but interesting all the same. It is intriguing that the three prime 'Hybrid' movers Audi, Toyota and Porsche have all gone down distinctly different routes. So it is great credit to the technical law makers that after first free practice the leading Porsche, Audi and Toyota were separated by a slim 0.675 secs. OK it is very early days and nobody knows who was trying at this stage, but at first glance Porsche are on the pace, straight out of the box!

Audi have been fairly conservative and are relying on a development of their original system which recovers energy under braking, stores it in a flywheel and then squirts it back to the front wheels when needed.  This gave them four-wheel drive while the hybrid system was active and was handy in the wet!

Toyota on the other hand recover their energy and store it in a ‘supercapacitor’ for later use. They gather energy via an MGU-K (Motor Generator Unit – Kinetic) and also via an MGU-H (Motor Generator Unit – Heat). The advantage of their ‘supercapacitor’ system is that it allows for more rapid charging and discharging than a battery, although they are slightly larger than batteries of a similar capacity. The two units work in tandem and Toyota are masters of the hybrid system so the two MGU’s can either work together to achieve acceleration or separately with the front MGU helping pull the car out corners. Unlike Audi they use a petrol engine.

Porsche are late comers to the hybrid ball, but they will have learnt a lot while busying themselves in development and cutting their teeth on the 911 GT3 R Hybrid which started life back in 2010. They chose not use that set up  believing that it might not stand up to the rigours of endurance racing, instead they had major rethink. Their system now has similarities to the current F1 hybrid cars. Based upon Lithium ion battery technology that they developed for their hybrid road cars. It works by capturing power under both acceleration and braking and storing it for later use .  Power is harvested by a ‘kinetic’ unit upfront and a ‘heat’ unit mounted onto the exhaust working off the turbo at the rear. The engine may be the forerunner of future  road car units producing an astonishing  500 horsepower from a two litre V4 engine.  What ever happened to those famous ‘boxer’ engines!

The battery lives in a water cooled casing within the cockpit and it has been made as small and light as possible. The whole things works for several reasons. Firstly the engine is light, powerful and compact which leaves space and spare weight for the battery.  Next the MGU-H (the heat one at the back) instantly transmits its power without the need  for complex storage under acceleration.  It also works perfectly with the lithium ion battery which at the same time can push out 300hp of electrical energy for several minutes at a time. Clever stuff .. the kind of solution you might expect from Porsche!

Let us not forget that there is a healthy grid of LMGTE cars too, but more of that later...

Jock Simpson.   

Pictures (C) Dave Davies 2014