HPD LMP1
ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS
01e represents almost everything Honda Performance Development (HPD) and Wirth Research have learned from its successful ARX programme. The car features all of the
Effi ciency drive B
HPD’s ‘new’ LMP1 challenger uses lessons learnt from its past Prototypes to try and beat the diesels on a modest budget
uilt from the same underpinnings as the company’s fl eet of championship-winning LMP2 cars, the HPD
BY MARSHALL PRUETT The rest of the package,
at least in spirit, conforms to the ACO’s vision of a more relevant, less expensive and less environmentally harmful
offering this as a P1 car?” I told them, ‘I’ll think about that, that’s interesting!”’ Coming from the extremely
expensive 02a project – a chassis built with all the latest technologies and construction
this car was designed
best bits distilled into this 2011 ACO-spec Prototype, and from the moment it started its racing career at the Sebring 12 hours in March, it has delivered. The use of the familiar ARX-01
chassis re-homologated as an HPD unit, after wholesale changes were made to the Courage LC 70/75 it was derived from, has allowed HPD and Wirth to avoid using the newly required engine cover fi n.
www.racecar-engineering.com • Le Mans for Le Mans
Prototype. To achieve this three- pointed criterion, HPD assistant vice president, Stephen Eriksen, says it took a slight nudge from the French organisers to consider modifying their P2 car to try and take on the diesels. ‘One of the things they’ve said after we were participating in Le Mans last year and did so well is, “This could be a P1 car. Why don’t you consider
methods – HPD’s limitations with the 01e were mostly fi nancial. ‘The 02a was literally a clean sheet and we were the fi rst to adopt the wide tyre format and very low polar moment of inertia- style car,’ Eriksen continued. ‘But we knew from that experience just how expensive that approach is. It’s really only appropriate to a full-on works programme, where
you’ve got the level of funding and the level of resources to be able to address a car that is that complex and that envelope expanding. If you look at the 02a, it has hydraulic power steering, it has wide front tyres, and all the complications that come out of that. It has ultra-expensive gears, an ultra-expensive gearbox and ultra-expensive suspension components. That is one approach.’
Although they did not know it
at the time, the 02a – run for just one season before being shelved when Honda’s bean counters pulled the plug on the LMP1 programme – would re-surface in 2011 and the lessons learnt with it would be applied to an 01e that had very little time or budget available.
‘With the economic crisis that
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