Le Mans is never quite what you expect, from the Sunday morning antiques/junk market in Place du Jacobins to the beautiful old town, something new always grabs you. This year it was an exceptional acoustic performance by Sarah Rakotomalala (check her out) but actually the biggest surprise for me was the action taken by the WEC and the ACO about garage visibility. Porsche was hit with a €5000 fine and a suspended one minute stop and go penalty.

Regular visitors to this page will know that at Racecar Engineering we believe that the engineering of the cars in all motor racing series should be on display at all time. This comes as no shock to anyone. At Le Mans in 2016 all three manufacturers went to great lengths to keep their cars covered, it reached the farcical point of the Audi human wall. That was wrong. Porsche and Toyota also took action to prevent people getting too good a look at their cars. Some teams posting mug shots of ‘spies’ inside the garage to make it clear who must be blocked, I was insulted not to be one of those mug shots!

As a result of the level of stupidity this reached in 2016 the ACO took strong action, fines were levied and it was made very clear indeed that cars should be seen by all. People attend motor races to see the cars, not over paid-ego machines called drivers (yes on this page we are biased) so it is wrong for the cars to be covered up or hidden. For years Formula 1 has banned the practice of covering cars on race weekend and it is great to see that the ACO is now adopting this policy.

However the penalty levied against Porsche is in my opinion wrong. The LMP1 team was felt to be too secretive at the pre-season prologue, and again at the Le Mans test. But I was at the test, shooting photos for this website and future print editions of Racecar Engineering, and at no point did I see Porsche cover anything – the only example was the secrecy plate mounted on the front jack stand.



This hides the front bulkhead and inboard front suspension layout (which is quite interesting), however this area of the car was openly on display for hours on end. In my view, as someone who spends all his time in the pit lane staring at cars Porsche did nothing wrong. I stood in front of the Porsche garage and at no point did the team members do anything to deliberately obstruct my view.



If the ACO felt that Porsche was excessively covering its car then the penalty should be simple and proportionate. Place the car on the pit lane, take the bodywork off, let the public and media photograph it, that would be a fair and just penalty. To create the spectre of what may be a race deciding stop and go penalty is wrong, and the fine is meaningless to a team that spends hundreds of millions of Euros a year.

There is a big issue here, and the wider racing world need take note, covering up design details of your cars is not only unsporting, it is downright rude. One German Formula SAE team, perhaps inspired by the antics of Audi & Porsche in 2016, seems to think that it is acceptable to keep their car under wraps.

In Formula 1 and at Le Mans it is unacceptable to cover a car for reasons of secrecy, in FSAE it is not only unacceptable but way outside of the spirit of the competition. So I ask here that all FSAE competitions demand that all teams make technical details of the cars available at all times and that covering cars or blocking the view of cars in anyway would result in immediate disqualification. Any team which thinks that this is an acceptable practice should realise that this attitude makes its team members unemployable. It is forbidden in F1, it is forbidden in WEC and it it should be forbidden in FSAE.

So I will make it something of a personal crusade that if a team covers the great engineering and technology of their cars, I will post details of what it is they are trying to hide on as many outlets as possible.