Audi says corrected fuel allowance changes nothing

Motorsport.com revealed prior to last month’s Le Mans 24 Hours that the Ingolstadt marque would be boosted by a revised Equivalence of Technology (EoT) formula, designed to address Audi’s inability to do more than 12 laps on a tank of fuel at La Sarthe.

The change has taken effect for this weekend’s 6 Hours of Nurburgring, where Audi starts with both its cars on the front row after beating sister marque Porsche in a wet qualifying session.

However, new Audi Head of LMP Stefan Dreyer believes that the change is not significant enough to allow Audi to stretch out its stint lengths any further, and that Porsche and Toyota will still have an advantage.

“The change is very minor, so don’t expect there to be a difference,” he said. “It’s not ideal for us to do less laps than the gasoline cars.

“This won’t change with the new EoT, I’m sure we’ll do one to two laps less [per stint] than our petrol competitors.”

Loic Duval added: “It’s a really small amount and it’s not going to change anything. Unfortunately I think we’ll be down in terms of number of laps per stint compared to Porsche and Toyota.

“We expect Porsche will do one lap more than us, and Toyota might be able to do two based on what we saw at Le Mans.

“That’s still a negative point for us, because we have to gain the time on track, and on strategy they always know what we’re going to do.”

One of Duval’s teammates in the #8 Audi, Lucas di Grassi, said that the rules need a further revision to allowed Audi to do an extra lap on a tank of fuel.

“To do a lap less is a big loss, especially on a drying track, because you’re taking risks for the others and they need to know if it works,” the Brazilian told Motorsport.com.

“It’s the downside of the rules at the moment, and the new EoT is exactly the same. It doesn’t change anything.

“We gained 200ml of capacity with the EoT, it doesn’t change anything. We need to get another lap.”