Yahoo Autos Every Lamborghini in Daytona 24 Penalized for Alleged Sandbagging
Though they may not have finished well in the 24 Hours of Daytona, the Lamborghini Huracans in the GTD class were way faster than anything else in the class by a wide margin. In fact, the fastest race lap set by a Huracan (1:45.873) was less than two seconds slower than the fastest lap in the GT LM class.
This didn't go unnoticed by other teams, and it definitely didn't go unnoticed by IMSA, which just penalized all five Huracans in the race by adding a pitstop and five more minutes to their overall time. This is after IMSA took the engines from the Huracans and dyno tested them after the race.
IMSA alleges that the Lamborghinis were sandbagging through practice and qualifying, and only showed their true speed in the race, hence the penalty under the rules establishing a balance of performance (BoP) from car-to-car in class.
Our man Marshall Pruett reports that the air restrictor is to blame:
Although IMSA elected to omit the specific reason for the penalties, Lamborghini is known to have supplied a highly advantageous air restrictor for the V10 engine that powers its cars, and Audi's R8 LMS and R8 LMS GT3 models.The restrictor was the same unit previously used by Audi on the last-generation R8 LMS. After IMSA performed baseline engine dyno testing on its GTD cars at the conclusion of the 2014 season, a number of discrepancies were found, and among them, air restrictors of different shapes were identified as the cause for power and torque outputs that did not match the series' BoP data.With the discrepancy identified on the R8 LMS, IMSA and the German brand agreed to discontinue the use of the optimized restrictor which delivered more power than expected and, starting in 2015, the series had its GTD field working from a corrected BoP table.
Additionally, all of Lamborghini's championship points from Daytona have been taken away and they have been fined $25,000.
There was a rumor at the race that everyone knew that the Lamborghinis were way faster than they let on beforehand and their intention was to win by so much that the penalties wouldn't make them lose the race. That obviously didn't pan out.
The results are yet to be updated, but the Lamborghinis ended up not doing too well in the final results, with their own cars crashing into each other overnight and another car running out of fuel right before the race ended.
