Air conditioning at Le Mans

[David Morton]

Small snippet - from 2006 all enclosed cars running at the Le Mans 24hr and The Le Mans Series (formerly known as LMES)
will have to have Air Conditioning as part of the fit. Any none enclosed cars will be ballasted by 25kg. Remember JJ Lehto running in the Mclaren F1GTR in 1997 - about 0800 on Sunday morning he fell asleep coming into the main straight in front of the pits. The car was so badly damaged as he hit the wall almost head on, Schnitzer had to retire it.
Apparently this new rule stipulates that the system must be capable of keeping the temperature to a maximum of 30c.
I can fall asleep /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/driving.gifat 24c no problem.
Dave M

 

[BenL]

[ QUOTE ]
Small snippet - from 2006 all enclosed cars running at the Le Mans 24hr and The Le Mans Series (formerly known as LMES) will have to have Air Conditioning as part of the fit.

[/ QUOTE ]
At this year's Le Man, at least one of the drivers was suffering from dehydration at the end of his shift. So I can see why they might change the rules like that.

 

It'll be feather cushions and marshmallow gearknobs next. Isn't staying awake part of the challenge?

 

[David Morton]

It surely is but there has to be a line drawn and I'm pleased they've done this. If I digress for a moment, in the earlier days of the B747, on a long(ish) flight once the talking ballast (the cabin crew) had finished the meal service, sometimes the engineer would increase the cabin temp to 26c and reduce the pressurization from 6000ft to 8000ft amsl so the talking freight (passengers) would, by and large, go to sleep. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/zzzzz.gif When it was breakfast time, the eng would reverse the previous selection and as if by magic 300+ people would wake up again. Nowadays with so much litigation about DVT I could not imagine any crew doing that sort of thing any more.
26C when you are sitting down is quite warm so with a driving suit, nomex, balaclava, helmet and gloves 30c is still rather warm.Even in the Audi R8 (open top car) the drivers had 3 to 4 helmets and loads of fresh balaclavas as they were never dry enough from perspiration (sweating) after the previous stint to wear again. Some of the guys used a forced air drying system for the helmets as well.
I'm not sure, but I believe that some of the drivers in NASCAR have a ram air helmet cooling system.