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Old 23 Feb 2020, 00:20 (Ref:3959286)   #8
carbsmith
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Join Date: Jan 2003
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carbsmith is going for a new lap record!carbsmith is going for a new lap record!carbsmith is going for a new lap record!carbsmith is going for a new lap record!carbsmith is going for a new lap record!carbsmith is going for a new lap record!
There is a lot of strange things with those lap times. So okay, the track was partially repaved very recently:

The fastest LMP2 time in practice 2 is 5s faster than the last time WEC was at this track. It's 3 seconds faster than any lap that weekend. If you look at Shanghai the 3 year lap time change there is small, only 0.5s difference, so you'd be inclined to say it's because of the new pavement then, right? But then I can't at all understand why the LMP1s are going so slow. This year's cars are about 3s slower then 2017 around Shanghai, and while the Rebellion is slower than that for CotA, it's not a lot. But so far they're lapping 3s slower than 2017 at this track too, while if the pavement is that great you'd expect them to be doing at least similar times. In particular there's no reason for the #7 to be so far off from the #8, the success penalty difference is nowhere near that big.

But maybe that's just looking too close anyways, the Shanghai practice times for LMP1 were pretty crap too, only 1.5s ahead of LMP2 which grew to 2.5s in qualifying and was at least that much in the race (the race winning Rebellion's best lap was only 2.5s faster than the best LMP2 lap, but the fastest lap of the race was nearly 1.3s faster than that)

By the way the ORECA 07 is just straight up faster than the Rebellion R-One was and would at least keep up with the original TS040.
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