[LM24 Race] 2021 24 Hours of Le Mans - Race week thread

[Adam43]

Originally Posted by canaglia

hubauto porsche photo has a very nice angle.
My best wishes to the team, ACO stained it self of a big big shame surrendering to chinese tencent pressures and forcing hubauto to remove taiwanese flag from their car. It's quite unaceptable winnie the pooh influence may spread that far including events completely unrelated to politic.

I didn’t hear about this. I get the gist, but what happened?

[canaglia]

"According to Taiwan-based website F-1 Auto Racing, China’s Wan Heping is currently the vice president of sports for the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, so Le Mans’ decision on the flag is based on pressure from Beijing. It may be. The car, which is the governing body for many auto racing events, including Le Mans. China considers Taiwan as part of its territory. Meanwhile, China’s Tencent broadcast team has announced that it will not broadcast Le Mans race this year, for no reason."


As far I've read also on other forums tencent basically told ACO they would not broadcast the race on china because it would had been counterproductive for a CCP tied broadcast to show a national taiwan flagged car to their brainwashed population... ACO searched for a last minute mediation with tencent, then the pressure directly from chinese FIA representative made the rest...
ACO forced hubauto to remove national flag for the race but tencent didn't broadcast the race anyway. Double cowardice, double shame.

[Simmi]

That's pretty messed up but altogether unsurprising.

The irony is the flags are so small these days you'd have to be looking super hard. I think I heard Absolute also changed their flag from Chinese to German in the lead-up to the race. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it was at the request of the Chinese motorsport federation, essentially not wanting to promote travel outside of China during COVID. Or something similar.

[canaglia]

Originally Posted by Simmi

That's pretty messed up but altogether unsurprising.

The irony is the flags are so small these days you'd have to be looking super hard. I think I heard Absolute also changed their flag from Chinese to German in the lead-up to the race. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it was at the request of the Chinese motorsport federation, essentially not wanting to promote travel outside of China during COVID. Or something similar.

china had always had this kind of aggressive denier behaviour toward taiwan state legitimacy, but you know it's not about being outraged for a dictatorial state that acts like a dictatorial state, big loser here is ACO who shown to be powerless against these kind of politc pressures...
The most ironic thing is that liberal ideas at the base of democratic states of west countries come from a revolution that happened in france...

[Simmi]

Just checked my photos - looks like they reverted to the Chinese Taipei flag, as seen in the Olympics.

[Adam43]

Originally Posted by Simmi

Just checked my photos - looks like they reverted to the Chinese Taipei flag, as seen in the Olympics.

Interesting. So they went to the compromise the Olympics had? Makes sense.

[Adam43]

Originally Posted by Adam43

Here is #22. Go Hanson! And recognised by the team as he got more laps. Presumably?

Although that does give you a bit more opportunity to bring the average of your top 50 down, I suppose. Don't think that is happening here.

They are more evenly matched than most cars, especially when you look over many laps.

Originally Posted by Simmi

Albuquerque had a really tough opening stint on the inters. Basically stuck it in reverse. That opening portion of the race will bring his top 50 down I'd assume.

Originally Posted by Adam43

It would help to know how much of the running was affected by conditions.

This gives some idea:

Albuquerque might of had 50 good condition laps after his first stint. However, only just so they all had to count in this measure. And how many had lots of traffic and slow zones? It is also clear that his second stint wasn't straight forward.

Although it is worth mentioning the 10 lap average is 0.4s down too.

Trying to nail this down some more.

The chart below shows the lap time (s) for each lap and when they occurred. It is certainly true that Albuquerque's ability to get 50 good laps in was compromised by him only getting one decent go in the better conditions (189-221). This started with that odd 1 lap stint! The other two had more time and later in the race when there was more green flag running and better track conditions.

I suspect the Top 50 is compromised for many drivers in many cars in this simple view.

Top 25 would have been better to do, I think. Even then it will never be perfect. So, I view this as an indication and not conclusive proof of anything, but I think we were already there on that. This goes some way to demonstrate that.

Good challenge there Simmi. Thanks

[Simmi]

Anyone got an idea of when the full race will be uploaded to YouTube? Thought we might have had it by now. Can't bring myself to watch it back with Eurosport comms on the ES Player. Sadly they removed the world feed from the on demand section.

I've downloaded the first 10 hours but was hoping we'd be able to access it freely it fairly soon.

[Mike E]

I hope so too. I couldn't watch the race live because I was moving house that weekend so was catching up in bits on the WEC app but they took down the replays before I got to the end. Also, the replay had no graphics so it was very hard to follow.

[Simmi]

Finally the full race is up on YT in English and French!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYRM...9D3jrdhJKiC7XS