Those interested in Endurance in general, and in the Suzuka 8 Hours, were able to appreciate, among other things, the explanations from Randy de Puniet regarding the performance differential between the European teams fighting for the world title, and the Japanese factory machines only put on track in Japan.
Christophe Guyot, the boss of the GMT94 team, provided additional and interesting insight on the Facebook page “ News & Reviews from MotoGP Consultants ».
Christophe Guyot : “First of all, I find Randy's analysis perfect. Nothing to remove. I can simply add clarification on the following points:
1) Motorcycle sport is above all a sport that follows rules. Nothing a priori can therefore explain such differences between the Japanese “factories” and the official or private European teams.
The engine and chassis regulations for the Endurance World Championship have been designed to enable performance, safety, technical development, while limiting costs.
However, this is not the case for electronics. She is free in EWC. Here we are in the only championship that allows the use of these electronics banned in WorldSBK and MotoGP since DORNA (promoter of these two championships) decided to balance the forces present and put an end to the development costs of these technologies.
Clear, the factory motorcycles entered in the Suzuka 8 Hours are equipped with ultra-sophisticated electronics banned today in MotoGP. This rule is obviously the same for all races in the championship, but it remains without effect. Japanese factories have never exported these electronics outside of Japan (apart from MotoGP until 2014).
This also applies to factory teams that participated in the entire championship. This is the case for example of YART, representative of the Yamaha factory, or the Honda FCC factory team, multi-winner of the Suzuka 8H, which cannot display the same level of performance in Europe as in Suzuka. It is of course difficult to quantify the advantage on time, but it will be interesting to compare the performance of the Honda FCC at Le Mans, in Germany, in Slovakia, and tomorrow in Japan. However, we must remain cautious, prefer analysis and avoid quantifying these differences, because the driving team may be different, just as the tires may present variable performances depending on the track. Suzuka is as such a circuit which presents difficulties encountered nowhere else due to the extreme temperatures of the region at this time, a particular grip and the very high average speed.
2) Another particularity, the EWC is the only road racing world championship which remains open to all brands of tires.
3) Finally, the participation of several factory machines and the investment of each Japanese brand make the Suzuka 8H a unique event. »
