the car that dieselgate killed

[aiyanah]

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following a failed campaign in 2016 to take back the crown of le mans from porsche (but a successful championship campaign in WEC) dieselgate came along and stopped us getting to witness one of the greatest engineering feats man has ever conceived.
the audi r18 2017 spec car.
now granted this car never even got into a wind tunnel as a scaled down model, but knowing how audi's hybrid flywheel tech was coming along with their evident speed at the end of the previous season it's fair to assume the stillborn challenger was certainly set to be something special.

so let's theorycraft.
how well would this car have actually done at le mans 2017?
would it have had the same reliability woes of the other systems?
would they have qualified on the front row at all or would the car be more geared towards race pace at the extent of raw qualifying pace?
perhaps the pace of the 3 hybrid prototypes racing each other would have broken them down even more and we would have legitimately had an lmp2 car being the overall winner?


really can't help feeling we've had some world changing tech kept in the blueprint phase with this car being put on ice.
just listen to her sister, who the fuck knew a low revving turbo diesel hybrid with kinetic energy recovery could sound so beautiful.

Spoiler: some telemetry with commentary if you wanna know what the thing is doing.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

that sucks. Have never really watched le mans, but gotta be a big shock that audi leaves the sport. Reminds me a bit of how engine manufacturers like BMW and honda left Formula 1 after the 2008 financial crash. The whole sport went pretty much to shit after that, and I haven't really watched it since then.

 

[aiyanah]

that sucks. Have never really watched le mans, but gotta be a big shock that audi leaves the sport. Reminds me a bit of how engine manufacturers like BMW and honda left Formula 1 after the 2008 financial crash. The whole sport went pretty much to shit after that, and I haven't really watched it since then.

Toyota leaving just as they figured out how to build a race winning car was painful, more painful than Honda cause we at least got to see the Honda car through brawn gp.
BMW I lost so much faith in after Dr Mario Theissen shat the bed and had them stop developing a race winning car not even halfway through the season, what year was that 08? fuck if I remember.

can't wait for the 2021 regs to preserve what's good about both sports, albeit I am skeptical of le mans hypercar rules reducing costs I am looking forward to the slew of hypercars that will be released by manufacturers waiting to enter into the new rules.
pretty certain audi won't be one of them and we wouldn't get the flywheel monster for public viewing back anyway.

i get so sad thinking about this car why the fuck did I make this thread.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

one can be sure about one thing – when bureaucrats start trying to sculpt the whole sport top-down, you can expect it's gonna go to shit. Like in F1 where they started introducing cost-saving regulations on engines and so on around 2006, but then realized that this results in all the cars just slowly driving around saving engines and fuel. No one is interested in watching that, so they introduce new shit to make the sport more "spectator friendly", like giving the drivers a button they can press to go faster like in mario kart. Or enforce rules that make the cars look "cooler" by making them wider and whatnot. It's just shit on top of shit in an endless stream of patchwork.

 

[aiyanah]

people excuse that behavior constantly.
"oh we need DRS cause otherwise overtaking is too difficult" yeah that's kinda the point lads, let the racers tell you themselves that overtaking should never be as simple as a button press.
of course now the grid themselves are succumbing to the brainwashing...but i digress.

once the regulations became concerned with providing "overtaking" more so than anything else that was the nail in the coffin for me, could be reverted though.
albeit it ties in too fluidly with chasing TV revenues so it's unlikely it ever gets reverted.

i can live with hybrids, i can live with humorous attempts to cut costs, i can live with the FIA changing how wide the cars are once a decade, i can live with the cars being box shaped or jet shaped honestly.
just can't stand it when the order of the day is "more overtaking cause it's what the peoplewant" and we have to dilute the standard of driving to get it.
and it's fucked up the tyres too! but that's for another day.
senna must be rolling in his grave lol

at least the purity of some racing circuits can't ever be taken away, albeit people can be put off of their charm.
eh, interested to see what happens with the motorsports scene, formula E seems to be making quicker strides than anticipated and i'm now questioning my initial outlook of it remaining an orbiter project for the long term.
of course this all depends on what the LMP1 category becomes and it's projected trajectory thereafter.
F1 has a bevy of young talent to milk for the forseeable so even if the needless bells and whistles stay in place there's something worth keeping an eye on.