A look back at Le Mans, a look forward to Bahrain and a personal update

I have to say, it was great fun working with my friends on Radio Le Mans during this years’ 24-hour race at Le Mans back in August. Of course it wasn’t the same; but we live in times where working from home is not so unusual, and I had a wonderful set-up in our dining room with as many screens as I could reasonably want to use. The ever-efficient and friendly folk at Al Kamel (official timekeepers for the WEC) also provided me with access to their V2 Protocol on Cloud data stream, which meant that I could see live timing data in real time. And if I needed access to my home library, I just had to nip upstairs to look up anything I wanted – especially where I trusted my own records rather than the lottery of information that is available on the internet.

Although I did contribute to the Radio Show Limited coverage of the 2020 editions of both the Nürburgring and Le Mans 24-hour races, this year was my first opportunity to be properly part of the commentary team since the diagnosis of my illness and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last year. I wasn’t sure, initially, how it was all going to pan out, but once I had the headset on, I felt that I slid into the groove very easily – and after a few minutes, it was like I had never been away. I took regular breaks, and even managed to tear myself away from the action in the night to get some sleep. Perhaps it set a precedent for my future contributions, or perhaps it was just another step in my recovery… we’ll see.

A lot seems to have happened since my last blog post, not only in terms of my personal life. From the point of view of my health, all is going reasonably well. I am still taking various medications – probably henceforth always will – but as long as it keeps the myeloma at bay, then I’m not going to complain. In July, I was at Spa-Francorchamps again, for the VW Fun Cup. For various reasons, I never quite got around to blogging about it, but from the point of view of my strength and endurance, it was a great success.

Since Le Mans, I have had various outings, not motor-racing related, but proving that I can drive myself around and visit friends and family as much as the Covid restrictions allow.

We are in the process of moving home: having lived in Surrey for more than half my life, my wife and I decided a move to a quieter part of England was appropriate. We surely underestimated the stress involved in selling and buying a house, but hopefully we are beyond the worst of it and will settle in quickly to our new abode and new surroundings.

In terms of the World Endurance Championship though, Le Mans represents the most recent round of the 2021 season. With just the double-header at Bahrain to wrap things up in the championship, I thought it was worth taking a brief look back at what happened in France in August, to see how the championship standings might shake out.

Personally, I find that the WEC has got itself in a bit of a mess. Having had an eight-round ‘super-season’ in 2018-2019, including two editions of the Le Mans 24 hours, we then had a single ‘winter season’ in 2019-2020, which also consisted of eight rounds. For 2021, we have returned to a ‘proper season’ consisting purely of races held in 2021, and which will end with two races on the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir. The first of these will take place over six hours and the second will be eight hours, on consecutive weekends, the last Saturday in October and the first Saturday in November. For a six-hour race, 25 points are awarded to the race winner, and for an 8-hour encounter, there are 38 points for the winners, so there are plenty of opportunities for strategists to exercise themselves over.

Toyota’s lead in the Manufacturers’ Championship is currently 51 points, so there is a mathematical chance that they won’t win it. That chance is one hardly worth bothering about, despite the presence of Alpine and Glickenhaus, there was not much doubt about the destination of the championships from the outset of this year’s six-round season.

However, just nine points separates the drivers of the no. 7 Toyota (Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez, winners at Le Mans) from the no. 8 (Kazuki Nakajima, Brendon Hartley and Sébastien Buemi), so everything is still to play for. Two wins for the no. 8 over the two Bahraini races would be needed for their squad to take the championship. A lot hangs on the Japanese cars being reliable: thus far this season they have achieved a one-two in three out of four races, can more of the same be expected in Bahrain? If so, then the nine-point margin makes the no. 7 squad a distinct favourite to repeat their triumph in the (eight-round) 2019-2020 season.

In the GTE-Pro class, the score stands at two wins each so far this year for Porsche and Ferrari. However, the Italian marque has won at the higher-scoring, longer races at Le Mans and Portimao, giving them a 16-point lead in the championship. Certainly not unassailable, but enough to count them favourites. In the drivers’ classification, Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado for Ferrari hold a 12-point lead over Porsche drivers Neel Jani and Kevin Estre.

Because each driver on the crew for each car scores the points earned by the car, it always just so happens that the drivers’ crown is shared by the squad driving the most successful car. This is only right and fair, of course. One would hardly expect the football World Cup in 1966 just to be awarded to Geoff Hurst, would one? George Cohen earned his right as a member of the winning team just as much – as did Jimmy Greaves, in my opinion, but that’s a whole different can of worms.

But, especially at Le Mans, I often get to wondering about the relative contribution of each driver to the finishing result. A driver’s contribution is difficult to assess, though, and is especially difficult to compare across a three-driver team, when team orders might play a role, as can the weather, the state of the car, and so on and so on.

For this a “Rising Average” graph is very useful. I show a few of these below, but first, it is important to understand how they are derived and how they should be interpreted. Al Kamel provides a very useful website: http://fiawec.alkamelsystems.com from which you can download a CSV file containing the lap time for every car on every lap. Load this onto your computer and you can have a great deal of fun comparing your own favourites. You could also double-check my numbers for me!

I am not going to provide a complete course in drawing graphs using Microsoft Excel, but I do strongly recommend that you don’t just take my word for it, but do your own research as well. To get a Rising Average, you should sort the file by car and then by lap time, so for each car the lap times are sorted, fastest to slowest. Then take the average of the fastest n laps, where n increases from 1 to the number of laps completed by the car. To assess each individual driver, sort the file first by driver, then by car, then by lap time, and perform the same exercise. Draw the results on a graph, and you will get something like this:

I said earlier that it is important to know how to read these graphs. At first glance, merely consider that the driver whose line is nearest the x-axis is the fastest. Indeed, the very left-hand end of the graph shows you the fastest lap of each driver (fastest is the average of one lap). However, equally important – some would say more so – is the gradient of the line. Simple arithmetic demands that the line will slope upwards from left to right, but the angle with which it slopes is an indication of the consistency of the driver. The nearer to flat, the nearer to 100% consistency is that driver.

So, comparing the Toyota drivers from the graph above, you can see that Kamui Kobayashi was consistently the quickest of all six of them and that Kazuki Nakajima was overall slowest. But you can also see that Jose Maria Lopez did fewer laps than any of the others. But look at the consistency demonstrated by Sébastien Buemi and Mike Conway. Regular readers know that I am big fan of Conway, and I was surprised to see that on a 10- to 20-lap average he was slowest of all the Toyota drivers, but his line is even flatter than that of Buemi, indicating that he was getting the best from his tyres over a long stint, and that his line carries on the furthest to the right, indicating that he was the busiest of all the drivers on the team.

Truly, this is a team game, and Conway’s part in the victory was just as important as that played by his team-mates.

Here is a similar graph showing the comparison of the other HYPERCAR entries, the Alpine and the two Glickenhauses.

The performance of Nicolas Lapierre sticks out here like a sore thumb. And fellow-countryman Olivier Pla had a good race as well.

Finally, a quick look at the GTE-Pro class.

The graph shows the first classified GTE Pro cars. Most surprising here is how poor Neel Jani compares with everyone else. Certainly not what one would expect from a Le Mans winner. Ferrari can thank James Calado for the win, but the performance of the Corvette was undoubtedly strong, in particular the contributions of Nicky Catsburg and Antonio Garciá.

As I said, these graphs can be very illuminating, and demonstrate how multi-dimensional an endurance race is. On occasion, they can lead one completely astray, but for a race as long as Le Mans, and for one in which the weather conditions remain stable throughout, they provide a very useful indicator to show who were the true heroes of the race.