When the FIA World Endurance Championship season 2018/19 starts, there will be several new cars on the track, not the least in LMP1, which really has burst into life.
BR Engineering recently presented their brand new BR1, which has been developed in collaboration with Dallara.
The plan is to field two cars with the SMP team, that Boris Rotenberg (BR) is co-owner of. ART Grand Prix will run the programme for SMP Racing.
BR Engineering has sold the first car outside the SMP team too, with the DragonSpeed team opting to buy a car for their upcoming LMP1 programme.
SMP Racing will run a AER P60, that was previously used by both Rebellion Racing and ByKolles Racing Team in their LMP1 cars. The engine is a V6 Turbo engine, with a power output at approximately 720 bhp.
The DragonSpeed team has chosen a natural aspirated Gibson GL458, which is an updated version of the engine that is currently being used in the LMP2 category.
Photo: BR Engineering
The car will weight 930 kg and will be sporting 18″ Michelin tires.
Mikhail Aleshin, Vitaly Petrov, Sergei Sirotkin, Kiril Ladygin, and Victor Shaytar have been running 64 hours in the car, in the shape of 173 test sessions with a total of 870 laps.
BR Engineering has experience from LMP2, where they fielded a pair of cars during the 2015 and 2016 seasons, which sadly isn’t allowed anymore due to the Global-LMP2 rules, which was initiated for the 2017 season onwards.
There are no news regarding the final driver line-ups in the three cars, but DragonSpeed has previously said that parts of their intended line-up will look this.
