Le Mans 24

[lkjohnson1950]

Well, a couple weeks back they held the 100th anniversary of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Ferrari took victory after a 50+ year absence from the endurance classic. This is what started the murmurs of F1 teams having an unfair advantage. Still it was a hard fought win with Toyota and Peugeot both leading at times. The new cars are so complex that more than one, including the winners, had to be 'rebooted' to get them running.  The win seemed to be quite popular and I think the Ferrari was the best looking hypercar on track.

[Jericoke]

It's certainly a great way to retain talent that can't work on an F1 team due to the budget cap.  Maybe even a way to circumvent the cap by letting them only work part time in F1, but still have a full time job?

I think it would also be a great way to develop talent too (though maybe a lot of F1 engineers/designers must come from other formulae first?  I don't really know.)

[cosworth151]

It strikes me that it may be the other way around. F1 teams can gain advantage by having a LeMans Hypercar program. I don't see how the FIA can police technology transfer from the Hypercar program to the F1 team under the budget cap.

[Alianora La Canta]

The 100th Le Mans was absolutely fantastic!

Ferrari's biggest advantage to running the Hypercar programme was it got to avoid a lot of extremely expensive layoffs that would have forced it to be highly uncompetitive in F1 (since it would not have been exempt from the cost cap, while nearly all expenses relating to the Hypercars are instead on the Hypercar budget). However, having them work part time in F1 while on the endurance payroll would be just about the worst way to do it, since this would inevitably get flagged up as an anomaly (if nothing else, the part-timer has to be granted access to the F1 data, and doing that to someone with no ostensible reason to have the access is going to alert auditors). Better to have an acknowledged and plausible part of the F1 payroll and simply underestimate the amount of time spent doing F1 vs non-F1 projects, if one wishes to do that sort of cheating.

Technology transfer is nearly impossible to police, but then again it's also nearly impossible to police technology transfer from sister teams, component providers and car manufacturers, which covers every team except Williams and possibly Alfa Romeo already.