Wed May 14, 2014 12:26 am by strop
The World Rally Team will come back with an official statement later, and to reiterate our thank yous, but the first thing of course we'd like to say is a big thanks to Der Bayer and those who helped put the whole big shebang together. A field of over 140 cars in 2 categories is a massive event by motorsport standards, and we were honoured to be a part of it. The event ran very smoothly, and the organisation was impeccable, even notwithstanding the aero controversy which was fortunately resolved in the nick of time. I cannot speak more highly of the effort that must have gone into making this work and releasing the results in a timely fashion, as well as the presentation and collation of data, and I have absolutely no doubts as to the integrity of the results.
To address the chatter around the paddock, I'd like to congratulate everybody for making this a fun, and at times slightly tense competition. While we were confident of a strong showing, a few of the other cars from independent entries proved to be a match for us and this is highly impressive. We won't hold back any secrets: As I mentioned once, the WRT is a supergroup of top end performance tuners and companies and our agenda was simply to go as fast as possible and push every limit. We have some advantages in knowledge, experience and resources, which we put to maximum use, and the results can be seen in the performance of both our NA and Turbo cars (though we were hoping that the slower stages would yield an advantage to the NA cars, though only stage 2 seemed sufficiently slow for this, given how the other NA cars performed).
Collectively, our tuning style is highly aggressive, though we stopped just short of the maximum extreme on all counts. As Casey Stoner, two time Moto GP champion said, winning a race is about finding the finest balance between going faster and falling off, and staying on that limit for the longest possible period. We wanted to find that absolute limit, so the engine was optimised for maximum power before it was made useable. The suspension is tuned for maximum turn-in but within limits that the car won't scrub speed due to too much lateral movement, or lose cornering power because of loss of contact of wheels with the ground, but we knew that since it was AWD (tends to straighten under hard acceleration) we could be very aggressive with the front suspension in particular. But the biggest gamble in the Turbo cars, and what I believe was the key to success, was the drivetrain. If you look at the top trump cards, you will find that the turbo cars took a relatively long time to get to 100, and this was because after launch, there was a period of nearly 2s where the engine suffered from turbo lag. This is because I deliberately tuned the first gear to be very tall, so I could shorten the other gears. The resultant acceleration beyond 100km/h was absolutely astronomical, meaning the car got to faster speeds quicker and stayed there better. Therein lay my major gambit for the Turbo cars.
That's what you'll probably find were the primary features of our tune as you inspect our cars. But as I said I'll come back with an official statement in response to the result later.
one more strong showing might push me in there come on top 20 for both of team C2!
