Illegal transmitter! Cadillac was withdrawn after the WEC season opener

(Motorsport-Total.com) – A rude awakening for Cadillac after 1,812 kilometers from Qatar: the V-Series.R of Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn and Sebastien Bourdais fail in the World Endurance Championship (WEC) season opener at Losail International Circuit Doha fourth place. The reason for this is the difference in the transmission of the LMDh hypercar.

The report published on Friday said: “The results of the 3D scan and further investigation show that the left and right rears are higher (in the Z axis) and misaligned (in the Y axis) than the target value from the Z axis . official CAD tool including tolerances allowed.”

The error was discovered during the technical monitoring inspection after the race on March 3. The reason it took so long was that the hearing of team manager Stephen Mitas was only conducted via video conference on March 16.

The fault appears to be with chassis supplier Dallara. In a report, the Italian chassis manufacturer admits that the parts in question were delivered to Ganassi-Cadillac without final quality control.

Regulators believed the argument and that there was no malicious intent, but Cadillac was still disqualified because of the illegal parts. This means that the privately entered AF Corse Ferrari #83 (Kubica/Schwarzman/Ye) moves up to fourth, followed by the Toyota #8 (Buemi/Hartley/Hirakawa). (Previous conviction document)

By climbing again – immediately after the race the Peugeot, which had broken down shortly before the end, was already eliminated – BMW #20 (S. van der Linde/Frijns/Rast) later scored another championship point. Alpine #36 (Lapierre/Schumacher/Vaxiviere) next to Mick Schumacher missed the points in eleventh place.

Fine against AF Corse

The AF Corse team was also penalized. Because of the wrongly declared engineers on the AF-Corse-Ferrari #54 (Flohr/Castellacci/Rigon), the team was fined 60,000 euros, of which 30,000 euros have been suspended until the end of the year. Apparently, an attempt was made to induct three engineers as marketing staff.

Of the three engineers involved, two were on the “inactive staff” list before the weekend. These are employees who are not directly involved in the race, such as media speakers. This list was rejected because the FIA ​​quickly realized that they were engineers.

A second list was submitted later in which the two “inactive” names were deleted. But they were also not put on the list of “operational staff”. This list was also rejected as the third name was still listed under “inactive workers”. In the third edition of the list, three names no longer appeared on any list.

Long audio and video conferences followed. AF Corse claimed that the three engineers’ passes were issued to Ferrari and not AF Corse, which led the FIA’s sporting envoy to believe they were working for the team’s hypercar arm. However, Ferrari denied this and said that the engineers were only intended for the team’s GT division.

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The Ferrari 296 GT3 of Thomas Flohr, Francesco Castellacci, Davide Rigon holds fifth place Grow

In them official FIA document There is frequent talk of deliberate “falsehood”, which makes the punishment lighter. The #54 Ferrari can also keep its fifth place in the LMGT3 class.