Photo Copyright 2015 Nick Dungan / AdrenalMedia.com
The two Porsche 919 Hybrids lead the WEC field into the first corner as the green flag drops.
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Texas' Lone Star Le Mans might be one of the best-kept secrets in motorsport. Now in it's third year, it takes place at the Circuit of the Americas—COTA to its friends—just to the east of Austin's airport. The track is state of the art, built to host Formula 1 on its return to the US in 2012. But that event takes place later in the year. COTA in September at is all about sports cars, a headlining double bill of the Tudor United Sportscar Championship (TUSC) during the day and the World Endurance Championship (WEC) racing into the night. It's Ars' favorite race to visit, in part because it's the only time the US gets to see the 1100-horsepower hybrids from Audi, Porsche, and Toyota.
Those three companies have been battling for supremacy for the last several of years with three very different approaches to the complicated questions asked in the WEC's technical rulebook. Those rules stretch for many pages, but essentially they equalize performance for different fuels and energy storage systems using a lap of the Le Mans circuit as a reference (Le Mans is the centerpiece of the WEC season, for the other races the formula is adjusted based on the length of the track).
Hybrid systems are allowed to deploy between 2MJ and 8MJ of energy during a single lap of Le Mans, augmenting the power from an internal combustion engine. Energy can be recovered from up to two motor/generator units (MGUs); usually this means recapturing kinetic energy from the front and rear wheels under braking. To balance things out, cars that recover and deploy 8MJ carry less fuel, and the flow rate at which they can feed it to the engine decreases.
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