The new Le Mans safety car procedure is “too long” according to multiple teams and drivers within the paddock.
“It’s interesting. It’s a little bit long,” Ferrari’s head of endurance race cars, Ferdinando Cannizzo, told MotorsportWeek.com.
“But, I think. It’s is a good step in the fact that at least, if you have a kind of issue during the race, you have opportunity to recover, which was not the case in the previous years,” said the Italian.
“If something happened, you lost the race from the very beginning, which is just a shame in such a long race.
“So positive comments. I think something can be improved, but I talked to the FIA and ACO, they working hard to improve the procedure. So we trust on the work and i think it’s a good step forward.
And when asked how the procedure could be improved, Cannizzo was very direct with what he feels is the issue.
“Yeah. Maybe can be a little bit shorter, which is the benefit for everything, but at the end is not that bad,” he said.
This is something United Autosports’ Oliver Jarvis agreed with when MotorsportWeek.com spoke with him in the build up to the race on Saturday.
“’I’m a bit mixed [about the new safety car procedure] to be honest,” said the Brit.
“The safety car can work both ways. In the past it has it has decided races which, you know, four hours into a. 24-hour races is wrong. So I think they needed to do something. Whether the current rules is the perfect solution… I’m not sure. I think it seems a bit long-winded, in my opinion.
My understanding is they’ll wait till the track’s green, and then start the [fallback] process. That could take a while.
I’d rather they start the process almost immediately, in a safe way. I believe safety car B and C could slowly catch up to A and your merge could happen over 10 or 15 minutes, safely. And then by the time the track’s clear, you’re ready to go green.”
However, both Jarvis, and Rahal Frey from the Iron Dames squad, agreed that ideally, the safety car won’t be needed at all during the race.
“Normally, they don’t want to use a safety car, unless they really have to. So fingers crossed there’s no major crashes and everything can be done with slow zones and full course yellow. That would be my preference,” said the 39-year-old United Autosports driver.
Frey, meanwhile, told media in response to a question from MotorsportWeek.com, “To give you the race director’s side, in the driver briefing, the safety car will be the worst case scenario.
“So he will hopefully try to go as much as possible with the slow zones. And, as racers, we all hope that we do not need safety cars.”
