Last weekend I was in the 24 hours of Le Mans, working with the QMMF team. This was the third and last race of the 2014 World Endurance Championship. The race was really good for us, we won the SuperStock category and finished 4th in the general classification of the race. With this race we finished the season in second position in the Superstock Championship.
The riders (Anthony West, Alex Cudlin and Mashel Al Naimi, plus Saeed Al Sulaiti as reserve) did a great job and the team worked really well. We didn’t have any crash and any mechanical problem during the race.
We had a great battle with the Suzuki Junior team, sometimes they were ahead, sometimes we were in front of them, and we never had more than 2 laps of difference between us. This is a very tight difference for a 24 hours race.
This is the first time that I have finished a 24 hours race, because in the first race of the season, the Bol d’Or, we broke the engine after the 9th hour. It has been a really nice experience, it is true that Endurance is a discipline that gets you hooked once you try it.
In the next photo we are in the 23 hour of the race. I am with Juanma, a guy with which I have shared many racing adventures during the last four years.
The day before the race I took a walk during the “pit walk”, where all the bikes are exposed to the public. I wanted to take a look at the Penz13 bike. They registered a BMW S1000RR bike in the Open category (which is only for prototypes, and normally the only bike that is racing there is the Metiss) instead of Superbikes.
They explained me that they were testing several things that made the bike not valid for the Superbikes category. Just looking at the amount of buttons that the bike had in the triple clamp, it is clear that a large part of those things must be related with electronics.
Of course I also dedicated some time to watch again my favorite bike of the grid, the Metiss. Every time I watch it I discover new details. I love this kind of prototypes. One more time, they were able to finish the race in the top ten.
Le Mans is a track completely bound to endurance races. The proof is that every box has a fuel pump connected to an elevated tank and all the teams connect their quick fill systems to those tanks.
I hope to repeat this World Endurance experience next year, and continue learning things in a team in which I feel really comfortable.
Ah! And congratulations to David Checa for the second World Championship he achieved in Le Mans!
Here you have a video made by Michelin which shows some highlights of this race. Enjoy! 🙂
Great pictures form the race. Would love to get your thoughts about the Metiss bike. I have see pictures and his blog. What do the riders think? I am a fan of the James Parker design. He I have had a few discussions with him and James believes the idea of frame flex in the corners is just a problem with the inefficiency of the telescopic fork. He tries to make the chase stiff as possible like a race car. The other bike thing is that the breaks work a lot better because the suspension works better.
What is your thoughts?
Charlie
Hi Charlie, thank you for your comment.
I don’t have any real experience working with any alternative front end, so I don’t think that my opinion has too much value.
I am not a big fan of any system in particular. I think that most of the different FFE systems could work well, I find it is more important a good execution (geometries, weight, detail design, etc) than the kind of system.