Rebellion Racing has confirmed it will drop one car from its line-up for the remainder of the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship, leaving it with a single entry as it focuses on its preparations for the 2017 season.
The Swiss team will withdraw the #12 R-One entry driven by Nicolas Prost, Nick Heidfeld and Nelson Piquet Jr (replaced by Mathias Beche at the Nurburgring), instead opting to keep the line-up of Dominik Kraihamer, Alexandre Imperatori and Matheo Tuscher in the #13 car which currently heads the LMP1 privateer standings.
Team manager Bart Hayden says the move is necessary to ensure Rebellion can invest the required resources into updating its car for the 2017 season with the FIA recently confirming new technical regulations to make the series more attractive to new privateer entrants.
"The level of competition in LMP1 is being taken to ever greater heights by the manufacturer entrants, so to improve our own competitiveness in the category, we feel the need to invest more time and resources into updating the Rebellion R-One cars ready for the 2017 season," said Hayden.
"As a small private team with limited resources, we have decided to focus on racing one car rather than two in the remaining FIA WEC events and this will allow us to put more effort into updating the cars for 2017.
"Earlier this year at Le Mans, the FIA and the ACO announced some changes to the regulations for privateer LMP1 cars for 2017 and we need to take those changes and make them into reality to put us in a more competitive position going forward."
He added: "Splitting our focus between running one car in the remaining races and on updating the cars for next year will mean that we can continue to be a part of the World Endurance Championship whilst at the same time making sure that we are as competitive as possible next year.
"We have decided to continue racing with the Rebellion R-One number 13 as that car is closer in the LMP1 Privateer Teams championship points standings to our rivals at ByKolles and it makes the fight for the championship a bigger challenge."
The withdrawal of the #12 entry leaves the privateer LMP1 class with just two cars, the second of which is the #4 ByKolles entry.
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