Where are the LMP1 privateers?

Hi everyone, I'm back to action.

Being able to see endurance news again, there was good news and worrying ones too.

The worrying ones are especially about the LMP1 privateer teams, a species that's almost in extintion.

The number of LMP1 privateer teams is getting down and down as time goes by, due to some reasons that are pretty understandable.

The main reason is the technical (and financial) part. Due to budget gap and fast and consistent evolution of factory teams, that lately brought some new elements to their cars, such as diesel-powered engines and sophisticated hybrid systems, privateers have to dream to stand a chance for overall win against factory LMP1s. Let's take Le Mans as example. The last privateer to even take an overall podium spot was Pescarolo Team in 2007, that closed its doors last month.

And to complement the situation, 2014 WEC's LMP-L category, destinated for privateers and prototypes without hybrid systems, not only has few entries, but the entrants(Rebellion and Lotus) are facing problems to finish their projects, the R-One and the T129.



These things are making hard to hold these kinds of teams in LMP1, so they change their fronts or downgrade class in the same front, as Strakka did this year. In fact is easy to think: "If our team won't be on the spotlights, better do it in LMP2".

It's hard to look to a group once we had teams like Pescarolo, Rollcentre, AMR, Epsilon Euskaadi, Strakka and many others being reduced to the point of having only Rebellion and Lotus, but all we can expect is that they do a good job to attract more privateers to LMP1 in the future, as may be the example of Ligier-OAK pertnership.

Photo: Oreca

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