I'm not sure I’ve ever headed to the Le Mans 24 Hours hoping for high temperatures and sunny weather. I’m no sun worshipper, and too much heat doesn’t make life any easier for a pasty-faced Englishman over the busiest week of my year. But this time I’m praying that the 24 Hours next month is a hot one. That’s not for my benefit, you understand, but for the sake of driver safety, the workload of hard-pressed mechanics, and the environment.
Some decent temperatures during the night are what I’m really hoping for. The ban on tyre warmers - traditionally diesel-heated ovens in endurance racing - in the World Endurance Championship for this year has created a situation that to my mind is dangerous and doesn’t yield the intended environmental gains. The sight of drivers struggling to warm up the rubber underneath them on an out-lap at Spa last weekend, and then spinning, wasn’t comfortable for me. Seeing cars spearing off into the barriers was somewhere between very concerning and bloody frightening.
The same can be said of the closing speeds at Eau Rouge. Just watch Kamui Kobayashi sweep around fellow Toyota driver Brendon Hartley - all four wheels off the track - as he took the lead in the final hour. It was a heart in the mouth moment.
If you’ve already seen that moment then you’ve probably watched the race, so I hope you’ll understand my worries. If you didn’t tune in, I’ll just mention a couple of the incidents on cold rubber over the course of the three days of the Spa 6 Hours meeting. Hartley went off at the top of Eau Rouge in qualifying and, more worrying, Antonio Fuoco crashed his Ferrari on the kink on the old start-finish straight right after the pit exit during the race. It was a significant impact that ended his day there and then.
Temperatures rose from 8 to 11 degrees over the course of the Belgian round of the WEC on Saturday. It could be colder than that in the night and through to dawn at Le Mans. And nor should we forget that it tends to rain more often than not during Le Mans week. Wet tyres lacking temperature on a damp track were responsible for any number of spins on the formation laps at Spa.
I’m fearful that the Dunlop Chicane is going to become some kind of racing car graveyard, that the massive speed differential between cars on cold rubber and those on tyres already up to temperature is going to cause high-speed accidents through the Esses, at Tertre Rouge and perhaps further into the long Le Mans lap. Most of all, I’m worried that someone is going to get hurt.
The dangers of running on unheated tyres weren’t suddenly thrown up by the weather conditions at Spa. They have been on the agenda since the beginning of the season: Ferrari driver James Calado, remember, was highly critical of the tyre warmer move after crashing in the Prologue pre-test at Sebring back in March.
Source: Autosport