Perrin LMP1 was supposed to be supplying customer teams. They had specifically partnered with Dacia, yes that Dacia. You can almost hear James May's fizz at the prospect of a Dacia branded race car. Unfortunately for Mr. May and all you Dacia fans out there the partnership fell through and Perrin has been forced to persue a different plan of attack.

The new plan centers around Le Mans and the Garage 56 program. Garage 56 is a way for teams to go racing with new technology without being constricted by the racing regulations. The famous DeltaWing was first seen as a Garage 56 entry. Perrin aims to build an all electric car based on Nio EP9 technology. The very same EP9 that blitzed the Nurburgring and briefly held the overall lap record for production cars. The technology is very stout and it is only logical to want to bring that kind of EV performance racing.

“I spent two years working on the successful Nio EP9 program,” Company founder Nicolas Perrin said. “The electric car has broken records everywhere despite its weight of nearly two tons. I want to bring this technology to the 24 Hours of Le Mans with a LMP1"

All electric laps of Le Mans is nothing new, it has been the goal for many teams. Unfortunately for them it never materialized. The demands of a track like Le Mans make a pure EV a significant challenge. Perrin is aiming to become the first car to ever complete a lap of Le Mans on purely electric power with the same level of performance as an LMP1 car. If that wasn't enough they are aiming even higher by adding autonomous driving capability.

Perrin is swinging for the fences on this one. They want the car capable of LMP1 speed with a human doing the driving and GTE performance under computer control. This is all very ambitious but if successful could be a massive leap forward in racing technology. There is one caveat to this entire undertaking. Even if everything goes perfectly the car will spend significantly more time in the pits than it will racing. For every 15 minutes of racing, the car will need 45 minutes in the pits for "reconditioning".

Yes, this is early days, yes new technology often requires a step backwards to take 2 steps forward, but I'm not so sure about this. Personally I believe they should have focused entirely on making a completely electric vehicle match the performance of it's dinosaur burning counterparts. That goes for overall pace and time in the pits for normal service. If they could have gotten something close to LMP1 speed with normalish pit stop times that would push EV racing forward enormously. Plus all of these Garage 56 entries have grand plans and almost all of them fall short of expectations. I definitely want to see where the project goes and for nothing else it should prove to be very interesting. But be careful, as every single sci fi movie has taught us, give the machines too much control and they will turn on us.

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# Motorsports # LeMans # WEC # Perrin # LMP1 # EVRacing # ElectricCars # AutonomousCars # ShiftingLanes