Le Mans Foray Now 'Impossible' For Ferrari

Now that the soap opera that has embroiled Formula One's off track energies seems to be finally calming down, one, potentially sad casualty is that Ferrari will not me making any factory based stabs at winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the greatest endurance race on the planet.

For a while there, it looked like Grand Prix racing, thanks to ham-handed abysmally awful management of Max Mosley was going to simultaneously explode and implode, leaving a multi-billion dollar smoking crater where the most popular form of motorosports in the world once stood.

Luckily, cooler head prevailed (i.e. someone talked to the guys with money, and Max quit/was shoved out the door) and it looks like we'll have GPs to watch for some time to come. The downside was that we won't have Max to laugh at (although that gets old) and Ferrari will not be having a serious go at Le Mans.

Ferrari ruled the roost, back in the early 60s, having supplanted Jaguar as the team to beat at the 24 hour classic. They were replaced at the top step of the podium by the might of Ford, and Ford was ousted by Porsche eventually. Such is the way of world-class sportscar racing. Since sportscar racing began, one marque has risen to dominance, sat at the top of the mountain for a while, only to be pried off by a new up and comer.

Most recently, it has been Audi. First with their crushingly effect R8s, and then with their ultra-high torque (yet efficient) R10s and R15s diesels. The prospect of Audi, and home favorites Peugeot, with their own high tech bio-diesel fueled rides, having to compete against Ferrari sounded like a great idea to me.

And besides, Ferrari could have gotten a lot out of it. When you're racing two-seaters, there's more stuff that you can apply directly to road machines. For example, just look at Audi's road going R8. That's a car to be taken seriously.

From an engineering standpoint, you can package things much more easily in a Le Mans style car. KERS hybrid systems, for example, are much easier to work out in a Le Mans prototype car than in an F1 car.

But sadly, this is all just "What if Superman fought The Hulk?" talk for now.

Luca di Montezemolo, head honcho at Ferrari, has now backed away from Ferrari fielding a works prototype in next year's famous 24 hours Le Mans race. "To race at Le Mans you have to concentrate for many, many months to prepare, to test and develop a car, and I think this today is quite impossible to do at the same time as racing at the maximum level in F1," he said.

Or as SpeedTV succinctly put it: "Ferrari-Le Mans foray now 'impossible'".

Ah crud ... this was going to be fun.

Source: SpeedTV Photos from Flickr users florenzkalvarec and Dave Hamster