News from Lola: Audi engined Lola gets set for Le Mans

[SurfaceUnits]

Lola will be working with yet another high profile manufacturer in 2007 after it was announced today that the Geneva based Swiss Spirit team will race a Lola B07/10 in this years Le Mans 24 Hours and Le Mans Series with factory support from Audi.

source: lolacars.com

With an all Swiss driver line up of Marcel Fassler and Jean Denis Deletraz, the team are sure to be front runners with the Audi V8 bi-turbo powered Lola LMP1. Today's announcement means that Lola now have programmes involving three manufacturers; Acura (Honda), Mazda and now the manufacturer that has recently re-written the sportscar history books - Audi.

Last season the Swiss Spirit team competed in a full European programme with the French, Courage chassis manufacturer. With Fassler continuing with the team for 2007 it was decided to upgrade to the Lola B07/10 chassis, that proved to be the only consistent challenger to the Audi R10's in last seasons American Le Mans Series.

In charge of the new combination of Lola chassis and Audi engine will be experienced sportscar entrant and long standing Audi customer Fred Stalder, who ran Touring Cars for the German manufacturer in the 1980's and 1990's. Jean Denis Deletraz has a long and varied career in motorsport after racing for the French GDBA F3000 team in the later 1980's before making his Formula One debut for the Larousse team in 1994.

Deletraz has also raced many sportscars and enjoyed success with Stalder's former team, ROC in 2001 and 2002 when they took victory in the LMP675 class at Le Mans.

Marcel Fassler is acknowledged as one of the fastest sportscar drivers around and is a former test driver for the Sauber Formula One team. He was also a front runner in the DTM with Mercedes and Opel.

Lola Cars International Ltd Managing Director, Rupert Manwaring said of the project: "This is a great opportunity to work with a fellow major player in International sportscar racing. The LMP1 has undergone a major update for the 2007 season. With these developments combined to the huge promise the design showed last season, it is another ringing endorsement of the trust that top teams and manufacturers have in Lola products."

The Lola B07/10 has undergone a significant aerodynamic upgrade to achieve sizeable performance gains at low and medium downforce tracks. The new evolution of the LMP1 car will also feature suspension and transmission changes to further enhance the cars durability in 12 and 24 hour races.

[pchall]

Interesting. AudiSport certainly has a pile of V8s sitting around and it beats just having another Lola AER in the field. It also make me wonder if Audi wants to revive the gasoline V8 program just in case the obvious bias in the regs in favor of diesels goes away.

[extramundane]

But Audi is providing a lot of help to make this work: they are motivated to do this because they want to prove that the equivalence (between petrol and diesel) is right.

And there you have it. It's an exclusive deal done not out of the kindness of Audi's heart or the desire to start a true privateer program, but as an attempt to prove the deck isn't stacked pro-diesel. All this Lola has to do is keep pace with Peugeot et voila! The petrol regs are magically justified!

'Course, the Lola is pretty much a POS (chosen apparently because it's the only P1 that's run regularly with a twin-turbo engine?), there's no guarantee that the Audi engine will play nice with the Lola gearbox, and the team/drivers in question don't exactly strike fear into the hearts of opponents. So how could it fail? :saywhat:

[Easy]

Are you implying that Deletraz isn't a world class pilot? Didn't you ever see him wring the neck of that Pacific F1 nearly under 10 seconds off the pace? :tony:

[extramundane]

Are you implying that Deletraz isn't a world class pilot? Didn't you ever see him wring the neck of that Pacific F1 nearly under 10 seconds off the pace? :tony:

He's certainly no Johnny Carwash.