fantasy f1 le mans lap time

[micky metro]

Given that the fastest cars lapped around 3.17 in qualifying at this years le mans, how much quicker would be a top f1 car be? 2.55...

[blueg33]

This has been done before, but I can't find the thread.

[RobM77]

I googled and found this link:

http://www.markwebber.com/wec/wec-guide/

This enables us to do a quick and dirty estimate. Mark's average F1 speed is 11.5% faster than his WEC average speed, so going by your 3m17s, that would be 22.7 seconds quicker, or 2m54s.

[keith bond]

i am not to sure about that a wec car would be much quicker in a straight line and le mans is very much that sort of circuit, Anthony Reid recently said he thought it would be very close indeed. the pole for wec would of been 19th on the f1 grid at the british grand prix.

[RobM77]

keith bond said:

i am not to sure about that a wec car would be much quicker in a straight line and le mans is very much that sort of circuit, Anthony Reid recently said he thought it would be very close indeed. the pole for wec would of been 19th on the f1 grid at the british grand prix.

How does that tally with the link above that I posted?

From that link:

MarkWebber.com said:

To compare the speed of LMP1 with F1, Mark’s fastest lap at last year’s British Grand Prix (average speed: 227.059kph) was just over 10.5 seconds quicker than the fastest WEC lap there (average speed: 203.600kph). At Silverstone, the race distance is over three and a half times that of an F1 race, which is in the region of just under 200 laps.

If what Anthony Reid is reported have said is true and comparable, then 19th on the F1 grid at that British GP would be 10.5 seconds behind pole, which even on the huge Silverstone F1 track sounds a bit much to me, unless one was wet and one was dry . Either that or the quote from Mark's website is misleading as it's comparing two non contempary cars (i.e. from different years)?

Just as a humorous side note, there was this often repeated rumour many years ago that a certain rally driver's Group B time around Estoril circuit would have put him halfway up the grid in the F1 GP that year. It turns out that in actual fact the Group B cars used a shorter circuit cutting some of the corners, rallycross style The other one I remember that's often repeated to this day is that 250cc karts are "as fast as F3 cars around some circuits", which they're absolutely not.

[joema]

Le Mans is low downforce so the F1 car would need to lose some aero and that would negate quite a bit of the short circuit speed the f1 car has over the LMP?

[Great Dane]

F1 is not great on top speed ie the wheels create a lot of drag... the CW factor is much better in sportscars