WEC: Cadillac was disqualified a month after the race

The first stage of the season in the endurance races, “1812 km Qatar”, took place almost a month ago, on March 2, but only yesterday were the results officially revised.

The Cadillac Racing factory team crew’s result, racing the V-Series.R hypercar No. 2, was canceled for technical regulation violations, and drivers Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn and Sebastien Bourdais lost 4th place at Losail .

A report from the stewards was published on Thursday explaining the nature of the violation: during a detailed technical inspection of the Cadillac sports prototype, which took place after the race, it was found that a number of body parts used in Qatar were non-compliant. correspond to the documentation previously provided by the team for FIA homologation.

In particular, it turned out that the stabilizers on the left and right sides of the diffuser of car No. 2 were higher and positioned differently than in the drawings of the federation team. The chassis for Cadillac was developed and built by the Italian company Dallara. It turned out that the discrepancy in the documentation was due to errors made and insufficiently thorough quality control.

The stewards’ report emphasizes that the errors were not intentional on the part of Cadillac or Dallara, but “nevertheless, there was a violation of the technical regulations, which resulted in sanctions in the form of disqualification.”

Presumably one of the consequences of this decision by the stewards was to the liking of the Italian team AF Corse and the fans of Robert Schwartzman, Robert Kubica and the Chinese driver Yifei Ye, because in the final protocol of the race their team moved one line and finished in 4th place. Let’s not forget that at the time they were the best racers competing in the Ferrari 499P hypercars, and all the places on the podium were taken by the teams competing in the Porsche 963.