Le Mans GTE Pro teams risk in-race penalties for manipulation

The pace of the new Ford GT and Ferrari 488 GTE cars in Thursday night qualifying raised many eyebrows in the paddock, further intensifying the BoP debate that has been a bone of contention in the class for most of the 2016 season.

Ford and Ferrari locked out the top seven positions in GTE Pro, with Ford’s fastest car, the #68 of Dirk Muller, lapping the Circuit de la Sarthe 4.815s faster than its quickest test day time two weeks prior.

The #51 Ferrari 488 GTE, driven by Gianmaria Bruni, was 4.3s faster in qualifying than it had been during the test at the beginning of the month.

“We are looking very attentively at the performances that we analyse, and we have good tools to it, FIA technical director Bernard Niclot told Motorsport.com.

“We will probably ask some questions again to the manufacturers and then we will decide the final BoP tomorrow [Friday]. We have some questions to analyse and my team are doing that today.”

“If someone has hidden performance, then we have the possibility to issue a penalty during the race and this will be discussed tomorrow and how we will apply it.

“We can apply a big penalty if we realise that a car has completely hidden the performance.”

Niclot went on to state that the Ford GT and Ferrari 488 GTE, both of which are built to new 2016 regulations, could be inherently quicker than their direct opposition. But he also acknowledged that some aspects of performance cannot be studied effectively and included in the BoP.

“Remember that in GTE we have new regulations this year,” added Niclot. “We are happy with these regulations because we can develop some very beautiful cars, but today we only have two cars that are built to the new regulations.

"These are new cars and all of the performance parameters cannot be addressed by BoP. There are a lot of things like the stability of the car, the braking ability and so on.

"These are not addressed in the BoP. So, some things are impossible to simulate or calculate.”

Tandy ‘not surprised’ by sandbagging

Among the manufacturers that have suffered following the dramatic increase of pace by the Ford and Ferrari entries is Porsche, which has entered a pair of factory 911 RSRs in the GTE Pro division.

Nick Tandy, who pilots the #91 car, told Motorsport.com that he has no doubts that some of his opposition operated in a different manner at the test day two weeks ago.

“It’s not unexpected [what Ford did],” said the defending overall Le Mans winner.

“From our point of view, we used the test day to find out how the car was working. Some other teams clearly didn’t, but that’s up to them.

"We hit the performance levels we expected, we’re faster than we’ve ever been round here."

Tandy described how his car has "no chance" of getting close to the 3m51s laps that Ford and Ferrari were able to achieve on Thursday.

“Based on the times of the test day, you can understand [the recent BoP changes]," continued the Briton. "But it should be obvious lap times on a single day don’t show you everything about a certain car.

“It's not hard to work out that, based on the lap times we could do last year and the available performance upgrades we have this year, as well as the weight we are required to run, we have no chance of running at 3m51s.”

Porsche's pace "quickest ever"

The fastest Porsche in qualifying yesterday was the #92, which in the hands of Frederic Makowiecki was the fastest car other than Ford and Ferrari but 3.733s off the ultimate pace.

“We’re happy with the pace of the car, and that we’ve done a good job," said Tandy. "3m54s is the fastest qualifying lap we’ve ever done, and it’s more or less what we simulated in the factory.

“I understand it’s possible in the regulations that it can be changed at any point. It’s up to the organisers – but I don’t think anything is going to happen.

"That’s the way the calculation has been made, and the pace of the respective cars is known for this circuit.”

Additional reporting by Jamie Klein