How Texas heat could affect Lone Star Le Mans strategies

As you might expect at this time of the year, it’s hot in Texas. Very hot.

And with temperature forecast to reach 37c for this weekend’s World Endurance Championship Lone Star Le Mans, it could be one of the hottest races of the season.

In fact, it could be so hot that there’s a possibility drivers may only be able to manage a single stint in the car before needing to get out and swap places with their team-mates.

That’s the view of BMW M Motorsport’s Dries Vanthoor, who said that while double stints is the target, there’s a chance drivers might only be able to last for 45 minutes. And if that happens to be the case, it could change how the race plays out.

“If we can’t do double stints then obviously we have to do singles, which then maybe change strategy quite a bit,” Vanthoor explained exclusively to The Pit Stop.

“But obviously our goal is to maybe see if we can do doubles or if it’s not. We have to see but obviously that changes things within the strategy.”

Being closed cockpit machines, the air will naturally become trapped inside the cockpits, with drivers getting very little respite from the heat and humidity.

It’s a different ballgame in singleseaters, where the air is constantly moving around you, but as Vanthoor explained, there’s very little you can really do to combat the heat in any of the sportscars on track.

“You can prepare for it in some kind of ways, but I just try my best. Don’t really do anything special and yeah, we just need to stay hydrated,” said Vanthoor. 

“We don’t have AC, but we have a fan to try and make sure that it’s trying to at least have some cold air coming in. Can’t really do much more.”

But while it’s easy to get hung up on the negatives, Vanthoor’s stablemate Rene Rast is looking at things from a slightly different perspective, highlighting that the heat could be an advantage for BMW when it comes to the tyres.

“Normally our car is quite good in the heat,” Rast explained to The Pit Stop Endurance. “So far we always perform better when the heat went up. But we’ll see. 

“For sure, everybody needs to make his own experience here on this with tyres. Which tyre to use and what to do with the tyres, this is the big question mark. 

“For the drivers as well, it’s going to be a big challenge in those conditions. It’s very hot and we’re going to suffer quite a lot in the heat.”