Family photos

Joining a gaggle for sons and nephews of famous fathers (messrs Brundle, Prost, Senna and Piquet) in the FIA WEC paddock and, Vincent Beltoise, nephew of Jean Pierre from the ELMS.

From the F3 ranks come Pedro Piquet, younger brother of Rebellion Racing’s Nelson Jr (both sons of course of double F1 World Champions Nelson Piquet), in F3, Mick Schumacher, another son of a multi F1 Championship winning father, Harrison Newey, son of aero superstar Adrian and the eventual polesitter, Lando Norris. Formula V8 3.5 driver Pietro Fittipaldi meanwhile is the grandson of F1 World Champ Emerson (and nephew of Max Papis)

Busy weekend looms for multiple drivers and teams

Matt Griffin is doing triple duty this weekend racing on Sunday in the FIA WEC for Clearwater Racing, and together with double duty partner Duncan Cameron in the Spirit of Race Ferrari 488 GTE in ELMS and in a Spirit of Race Ferrari 488 GT3 in British GT on Monday.

Nicolas Lapierre, Darren Turner and Nicki Thiim all do double WEC/ ELMS duty to as do Proton/ Dempsey Proton pairing Christian Ried and Matteo Cairoli.

Spirit of Race and Proton Competition are the only two teams doing double duty (the latter under the Dempsey Proton banner in FIA WEC.) G-Drive Racing have an Oreca 07 on both entires but fielded by different teams with the WEC car under the wing of TDS Racing, the ELMS car fielded by G-Drive Racing by Dragonspeed.

Derani’s GTE Pro debut looms

Pipo Derani arrives at his first FIA WEC meeting with Ford Chip Ganassi Team UK with limited testing in the Ford GT under his belt. Prior to the first on-track action yesterday, Derani had complete just two days testing in the car at Motorland Aragon in Spain, the Brazilian star missing the WEC Prologue at Monza earlier this month.

2018 LMP1 NH Regulations finalised

Ginetta’s technical director Ewan Baldry has confirmed to DSC that the 2018 LMP1 non-hybrid technical regulations have been set in stone, allowing the Yorkshire-based manufacturer to make significant progress on the development of its LMP1 challenger.

“Having signed up as a constructor we get a place in the Technical Working Group,” said Baldry. “We started looking last summer and at that time the regs were slightly different, then with Audi pulling out they were re-worked. So we did our initial work based on the original proposed regulations, which were later tweaked.

“Then around December we received confirmation, and the definitive regulations for 2018 which will be fixed for five years.

“That meant we were able to start on our CFD program with Automotive Research Centre.”

A peek inside Porsche’s workstation

During this morning’s Free Practice session, DSC was toured around the Porsche LMP1 Team garage, for a glimpse into how things have progressed in the LMP1 class’ paddock set up in recent years.

The Porsche LMP1 garage is simply staggering, in both size and sophistication. Every part is taken account of, every staff member has a designated work space, and the sheer amount of storage and spare parts available on hand is eye-opening.

With just three trucks, the team brings with it enough spares to make two almost completely new 919 hybrids (though there’s just one spare tub), a full data centre, work benches for repair work on damaged parts, the storage units for all the team’s tools and the framework to create the garage layout itself.

69 team members are on-site at Silverstone, of the 250 staff members who work on Porsche’s LMP1 programme at large. The number will decrease slightly to 62 though after Le Mans, as per series’ regulations.

It’s certainly a team which is run on par with those in the Formula One paddock.