MASTERS ENDURANCE LEGENDS
Friday 15:13 - 15:43
RACE 9 Saturday 17:10 - 17:50 RACE 17 Sunday 14:50 - 15:20
Back in the seventies , when historic racing first started , the cars used were often no older than from the previous decade . Then for years , the cut-off year for historics remained firmly fixed in the 1980s . Only recently , historic racing has been playing catch-up by introducing championships and series for nineties and even 21st-century cars .
The Masters Endurance Legends , now in its sixth year , was originally founded for Le Mans prototypes and GTs from 1995 to 2010 , but its cut-off date has been raised in steps to the present 2017 .
While many of the open-top prototypes in the series already look historic compared to the current closed-top hypercars , there is much history as well in the eligible championships in which these cars used to run . In today ’ s neatly ordered sports car world of WEC / ELMS and IMSA – now based on a truly common set of rules for the first time for ages – series such as the FIA Sports Racing World Cup , the International Sports Racing Series , the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup , the United States Road Racing Championship and Grand- Am all have a distinctly ancient ring to them . As the new LMH and LMDh classes get into full swing , and with Le Mans finally succumbing to pressure to adopt GT3 , categories such as LMP1 and GTE will soon become historic and obsolete as much as LMP900 , LMP675 , GT1 and GT2 already are .
Masters Endurance Legends generally follows the class distinctions of the past decades , having divided the field into three main classes named P1 , P2 and P3 , which are subsequently split according to age . Therefore , the fastest prototypes are found in the Group 2 / Prototype 1 ( G2 / P1 ) class where they are led by a pair of Peugeot 90Xs raced by Steve Tandy and Kriton Lendoudis from Greece . 90X was the codename for the 3.7-litre V8-engined prototype that followed the original twin-turbo 5.5-litre V12- engined 908 HDi FAP that missed out on the Le Mans win in their fight against Audi before finally hitting the jackpot in 2009 . The less powerful but more agile 90X morphed into the 908 that performed one last trick in 2011 but again lost out to Audi . Now , Peugeot is back with the 9X8 Hypercar .
Pitched against the two diesel-powered Peugeots are Christophe d ’ Ansembourg ’ s screaming V12-engined Aston Martin DBR1-2 , which will probably be one of the loudest car of the weekend , and Mike Cantillon ’ s Juddengined Pescarolo 01 . They will be joined by two examples of the petty Lola B12 / 60 – the white Steve Brooks / Martin O ’ Connell car is an ex-Dyson Racing car with ALMS heritage , powered by an AER four-pot turbo badged by Mazda , while Alan Purbrick and David Brise debut their ex-Rebellion machine . Meanwhile , James Cottingham will bring the very interesting Epsilon-Euskadi ee1 prototype which along with their failed Formula One project proved to be another case of ‘ what might have been ’ for the Spanish / Basque
85