WEC Silverstone: André Lotterer Qualifying Interview

[Howard]

RaceDepartment's Seb Scott sat down with Audi's André Lotterer after a difficult qualifying session for the team.

Lotterer qualified 5th, behind both Porsches, the partner Audi and Toyota. "I didn't manage my consumption well on my first attempt, and on my second attempt I hit a lot of traffic. So, I didn't use the full potential of the car."

"I went back out on new tyres to improve, a 1:40.2, which is the same as our sister car. It would have been more beneficial to put Marcel [Fassler] back out with new tyres, because he would have improved the average."

With the race being 6 hours, it can be said that qualifying position is not as crucial as it is in sprint races, or short endurance such as Formula 1. Lotterer said "Every second that's lost is lost, and you can never recover it. So, for sure we have to fight our way back as quick as possible tomorrow. Hopefully we'll have the car for it, and everything will work according to plan - good strategy, the right tyres at the right time, hopefully no incidents. At the moment it looks like we have good race pace."

André also spoke about his experience in F1 with Caterham in Spa 2014. He was critical of F1's new engine generation, saying that F1 should be about raw pace and racing, rather than efficiency.

"They should be there to sell the dream, to sell the no compromise, to sell the maximum performance to the people, to really open their eyes. When the cars pass by it makes the body vibrate, that's what it used to do. People were like 'my God, this is nuts!' Now, it's not impressive at all.

"[The WEC], on the other side, is there for different things, we have very impressive looking cars so this is already an advantage for us. Of course, our car as a diesel doesn't sound very sexy either, but it's a piece of technology which makes it very interesting.

"I think we have a completely different task for manufacturers to show new efficient technologies over 24 hours, which is a marketing tool for the car brands, and can be transferred back to the road car.

"We consume 20-30% less fuel, but in Formula 1, over an hour and a half races, who cares? They just want to have maximum entertainment."

Image © Audi​

 

[Torcano]

This man speaks the golden words of truth - F1 should always be the absolute and uncompromised avatar of visceral motorsport. Massive respect for the guy.

Even I never really understood why they were so caught up with being so eco-friendly when they are relatively short duration sprint races. Who are they trying to please with going in this direction by gimping themselves and as a result raising the costs for smaller teams to adapt to the unnecessary restrictions is beyond me, just look at the running costs for just the engines this year.

If they want so badly to plant their feet on the ground and say to people that age old saying of "F1 tech trickles down into normal road cars", the fact that the super-capacitor based MGU systems on today's F1 cars are totally unrealistic to ever come to normal road cars (Mclaren says they will implement it in their cars... someday in a galaxy far far away but even those plans are hazy at best) but the flywheel based ones like the one Audi uses in their LMP cars are far more feasible just says it all. F1 is half-arsing its way through and through. It's neither eco-friendly as it is trying so hard to be nor the pinnacle of motorsport like it used to be, while WEC is in a position to steal F1's crown in both efficiency and tech prowess. A proper shame on F1 really.

Who would have thought F1 would one day become the feeder series for WEC.