Mon Dec 21, 2015 9:15 am by iRaptor
Press Conference with Mike Lewis, CEO of Lefatti Automobile :
Mike : Hello everyone, thank you for being here. First of all, we are grateful for the very small group people who kept following us while we were facing difficulties with our facilities. We decided to organise this little press conference in order to clear some of our ideas and strategies in the short and medium-term, and we feel very confident about the business of our little company, which is run by sports cars fans, for the fans.
Well, now, time for some questions. Do we have anybody here willing to give some?
Marcus Rumpfkeil, German journalist for the Built, raises his hand :
Markus : Hallo Mister. Can you comment on the first company outings?
Mike : Well we have a small team of engineers working on different projects. At first, we had most of them focusing on the Hot Hatch Cup, then we divided our team in order to get two Prototype entries for the Automation World Endurance Championship.
We had some very surprising and promising results during the first two races for our little hatchback, with a P6 and a P5, granting us two points for our very second race in motorsport. We discovered the car was around 50kg heavier than our main rivals after running the data simulation on the first race. With some more experience, chances are we would have done better laptimes as our chassis had some issues. We also fiddled too much with the setup, and our optimal one was around half a second faster than our latest laptimes on the Airfield track. However the car was tested there so we think our best result should be done in there.
Our Prototypes had some satisfying results, with our P1 being 3rd in the class rankings. Our P2 is in the last quarter in the standings, even though both cars were designed very similarly. We focused on having the lightest trims according to the rules, and having a great drivability. It turns out our P1 is the lightest and one of the most drivable car of the competition, while the P2 is a bit behind in both parts. However this was going to settle laptimes a lot worse than most of our competitors. This resulted in having the P1 being almost 3 seconds faster than any of the top10 finishers for the first race. Thankfully, we only needed 7 pitstops for the whole duration of the 24H of LeMans, and this was satisfying. The P2 was barely a second slower over a lap, and we still have to find out the issues coming from our average results. But we are still quite pleased by the first few results for our young and talented engineer team and it can only be better in the future.
Markus : Would you mind telling your plans about 2016?
Interesting question. Well as you might have seen, we are mainly a sportscar company, so chances are we might start building some nimble cars soon, don't you think?
Well more seriously, we went back to the drawing boards as soon as we completed our race cars. As a tiny company, owning small facilities and few engineers, we heavily invested on simulations, with CAD softwares such as SimScale for some of our aero testings. We couldn't afford using windtunnels or building a lot, so we decided to use some very innovative, or more precisely, very original ideas, as in using powerful portable computers alongside the more complex units in our newly-built headquarters located a few kilometers from the Mugello racetrack. This idea probably sounds quite strange, however it allows our engineers to work on the different projects at anytime they want. They are required to carry them, but are not obliged to work outside their schedule. The idea behind that is that they can add any ideas to the private cloud-based project whenever they want as it is optional. They are obviously given bonuses on their salary depending of the extra work they have done. We are also considering to open our cloud-based project and make it partly public.
Cars-wise, we are still working on alot of ideas. While some are probably staying as prototypes (not related to our race entries), some other ones are really pushed and may make it as concept-cars, or even being sold to the public. One of our engineers went as far as creating a crazy lightweight car. It will stay as a computer-aided prototype though. We are not willing to build a 3 000 000$, 600kg carbon-fiber hatchback with a motorbike engine boasting more than 400hp/ton you know.
Our serious projects include a lightweight mid-engined car. The family will include an entry-level trim affordable for many of the car enthusiast people weighing under a ton, a Sport version boasting a carbon-fiber body and a more powerful engine while still being affordable, a Performance trim with an extensive use of carbon-fiber and being one of the lightest cars on the market, and a Cup version, a barely street-legal version that can be bought by customer for racing events, be it by racing alone, being used on any cups, or with a special cup which might include some of our models, eventually alongside some other companies on the market. Price should be anywhere between 25K to 150K
Our second project will be designed for Time Attack competition, where powerful, bespoke track cars are often boasting 1 HP/KG. While the idea is well into development, we are still hesitant about the main design of the car. Early simulations are well under what we are expecting so we might be overhauling the project extensively. Price won't be revealed yet.
The third project is a mid-engined supercar. We are willing to get into the supercar market, while still using our main development path, shared from all the present and future project of our company. The price should be ranging anywhere between 150K and 400K.
The fourth project is making our Automation Prototype race cars into street-legal versions. Very few changes will be needed, as our engine simply need some fine tuning to make more of all the unused power. Extensive testing from the block proved the huge reliability of our V6 under all kinds of load. Having the fuel consumption of an Impreza while having a bit less than 2 times its power shows the tuning possibilities. However the car is far into our list. We are very hopeful about our entries for an eventual 2nd season as our brainstorming sessions about rule analysis showed we can squeeze alot more pace while still fitting into the rules. More or less, you know. As per every Formula 1 car.
In the meantime, make sure you have a look at our second concept car, the Lefatti Feroce, the lightweight mid-engined car!
The RS400 version, shown here, boast 400 hp/ton. Weighing less than 800kg and sporting a very high revving crossplane V8, you'll be off to 100kmh from a standstill in barely 3 seconds. That's the same time needed to realise the fact that sitting inside such a lightweight car isn't a good idea after eating your lunch.
Stay tuned for the second part of the interview.
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Last edited by
iRaptor on Mon Dec 21, 2015 10:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
Lefatti Automobili :
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=4421&start=10---------------------------------
Lefatti Automobili - Car Company
Scirocco by Lefatti Automobili - Racing Department
More to be announced very soon.