Ahead of the WEC season opener, BMW has “hopefully solved” the reliability issues with the M Hybrid V8 – BMW’s Head of Sport is “confident, but you never know “
Despite the disappointment at the 24-hour race in Daytona, when both BMW M Hybrid V8s were affected by technical problems, the Munich-based company is confident that it is well prepared for the season opener of the World Endurance Championship (WEC). BMW has obviously invested a lot of work in recent weeks to eliminate the reliability problems on the LMDh cars
“The car was fast enough to be on the podium, but we had problems with reliability,” recalls BMW Head of Motorsport Andreas Roos in an interview with the English-language edition of Motorsport.com,
“That was our top priority in the last days of Daytona until now to solve these problems,” said Roos. The best BMW M Hybrid V8 finished seventh at Daytona, 13 laps down. “We are confident that what happened there should not happen here, but you never know. “
“Reliability is always a big issue “
“That’s certainly the ultimate goal, because after all, we’re driving endurance races and, as the saying goes, you have to finish first to finish first.” In order to finish the WEC season opener in Qatar (all information at a glance!) without any problems, BMW completed a 24-hour test in Spain, among other things.
“Reliability is always a big issue and that’s what we work on the most to make sure that the cars are reliable,” says Roos. The Munich-based team was unable to prove this at the Daytona classic: The 25 BMW M Hybrid lost a lot of time due to a leak in the transmission cooler, while the sister car with starting number 24 stopped on the track due to electronics problems.
Dries Vanthoor, who co-drives with Raffaele Marciello and Marco Wittmann in the WEC, remains calm despite the difficulties. “We had a few setbacks, but it was only the car’s second 24-hour race,” the Belgian told Motorsport.com.
“We obviously had a few setbacks, but in Munich they picked up on that very quickly, did their homework and have already made some improvements so that it doesn’t happen again,” said Vanthoor. “So everything should be fine. “
BMW problems are “hopefully solved “
Sheldon van der Linde, who will be racing in the 2024 WEC together with Robin Frijns and Rene Rast, agrees: “We’ve done a lot of testing. We completed a 24-hour endurance test in Aragon last month, which went really well.”
“We managed to complete the test with almost no problems,” the South African told Motorsport.com. “We did a lot of testing for the WEC in the time between the IMSA races, especially with WRT. So in terms of testing, we’ve put a lot of kilometers on the car, which is important. Reliability is the first step and once that’s sorted, we can work on performance. “
“In terms of reliability, we obviously had some issues. We tried to solve them,” BMW works driver Rast told Motorsport.com. However, the three-time DTM champion remains cautious: “We’ve had a few days of testing and hopefully we’ve solved them, but we don’t know. We’ll see in a few days whether the car is actually running without problems.”
A challenge awaits BMW right at the start of the season, as the ten-hour race in Qatar is the second-longest WRC race on the calendar after Le Mans. Is the risk of problems particularly high? “Hopefully not,” says Rast. “Of course it’s longer, but the car is built for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, so hopefully it will last 10 hours. “
