Thank Frankel it's Friday: Looking forward to WEC 2017

Silverstone is a fabulous place to watch these cars race because its high speed corners show off the modern prototype sportscar to its best effect. Through the Becketts complex you will barely believe the speed at which the top cars are changing direction, and if they happen across a car from the lower GTE formula, the speed at which they overtake mid-bend will boil your brain still further. And a GTE car, as anyone who’s seen one in action will tell you, is a very rapid racing machine indeed.

But there will be sadness in Northamptonshire too, sadness because this will be the first round of top-flight sportscar racing to take place in 18 years without an Audi prototype in the field. And although it has been the dominant force in the sport for most of that time, of late Audi has been rivalled successfully by Porsche and, on occasion, Toyota too, so it’s not like Volkswagen leaving the World Rally Championship and watching it come alive as a result, as has happened so far this year. Although I’ve been critical of some of the ways Audi has gone racing – including introducing diesel cars that at night at Le Mans could neither be seen nor heard – I’ve never joined the chorus who blamed Audi for the success that for a while appeared to be ruining the sport. And I’ve always admired the spirit in which it has gone racing, never knowing when it’s beaten and on those rare occasions when it was bested, conceding defeat with a grace that did the team enormous credit.

I’m sad too that Robert Kubica will not be making his top-level debut after all, opting as he has to give up his seat in the ByKolles Racing LMP1 car. He’s not said why though if it turned out because he’d lost confidence in his team’s ability to deliver a raceable car that stood a decent chance of reaching the finish, given the testing results so far I think he could be forgiven. To me, it is astonishing that Kubica is still only 32, a mere month older than Lewis Hamilton, and it is one of the great pities of modern racing that we never got to see how good he could have been at his peak with a Formula One car commensurate to his talent. I’m sure many of you will remember his enormous crash at the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix, one of most violent ever witnessed from which a driver emerged without serious injury. But I wonder how many recall that having missed just one race he came fourth at the French Grand Prix just three weeks later? Or that he came back to win the Canadian Grand Prix the following year and score what remains to date BMW’s one and only win as a constructor in F1? Or that the person who replaced him at the one race he missed was  BMW’s teenage test driver, the now four-times world champion Sebastian Vettel?

But despite all this, the WEC will be a blast, not least because behind headlines sure to be dominated by Porsche and Toyota’s battle for the title, the competition in LMP2 and GTE categories will be hotter still. If you’ve got no particular plans this weekend, a day or two at Silverstone should guarantee you will enjoy one of the more exciting and rewarding of Easter weekends.

Images courtesy of LAT