if there were no restrictors....

[Osella]

IF there were no restrictions on the air being breathed in by sportscars and GT cars' motors, what would be the downsides? (I'm trying to second-guess the rulemakers here).

is it just grounds of cost and safety?

How much power would we get, unrestricted?

In endurance racing, wouldn't it be better to let the teams get the balnce between insane horsepower and reliabilty right?

To my untutored eye, a big car like an R8 or a B2K Lola or Reynard is a far more sensible place to put 900bhp than an F1 car!

[Hauptmann6]

Cost and safety are it... You would be looking at 240+ speeds on the Mulsanne as it is now... And the big turbo teams(Audi Bently) would be unchallengeable...

And the big American V8 and 10s would be unstoppable in GTS.

[Garrett]

In racing, why restrict the field. If the driver is too chicken to get in a 900hp or 1000hp car, then don't race. I would love to see 1000 horses coming from a le mans car as Nissan did in 1990 where they ran around 1000hp in qualifying. I my opinion, unrestricted racing is the way it should be. 230mph at le mans would be great to see again on the firt part of the straight.

[danhx]

Nissan actually upwards of 1200 hp in one of they qualifying runs because the wastegates on Mark Blundell's car jammed shut and the boost shot out the roof. He hit something like 245 on the straight and was getting wheelspin in fifth gear. Crazy stuff, i'd love to see it again.

P.S. - Garrett, it's good to see another Georgia boy mulling around here

[C_g]

Safety. These flat-bottom cars have taken off (flipped) at speeds well under 200mph. Anything well over that, well, you're just tempting fate.

[Sean Crockett]

But for 2004 & beyond....

[gi_gav]

I'm sort of playing devils advocate here, but why does it matter whether a car does 210mph or 240?

To the naked eye, there can't be much difference (and you're not even supposed to be watching on the Mulsanne anyway...) and i can't imagine that it makes for better racing.

Cars sliding about in the corners is a different matter! Balancing a car on the limit of adhesion is what motorsport is all about, not how fast a car goes in a straight line.

[gttouring]

good point, balancing a car on its limit is motorsports excitent. But these artificial restrictions, they are a bit arbitrary, a 1200 horsepower car may likely never last 24 hrs. so half that or abouts, seems to be a good call, but restricting also seems to keep a parity among the teams to keep racing dicey, Bently and Audi would do more damage, without these. as other teams get closer to this level of performance then we will see the greatest battles ever, it is only a matter of time and maybe this year we will see, weaver did do very well in the LMP675
Of course we do not ever want to see restriction reaching Daytona Prototype levels, this is appalling.

[C_g]

Originally posted by gi_gav
I'm sort of playing devils advocate here, but why does it matter whether a car does 210mph or 240?

I agree gi_gav, there really isn't much of a difference visually, but we humans like numbers. *shrug*

There is a big difference between 210 and 240 as far as safety is concerned though. Aerodynamic force approximately goes as the square of the speed. So even though it's only 14% faster, the forces involved are approximately 30% larger. So 30% higher downforce, upforce, whatever. And that's a real concern.