LUCA CIANCETTI: “DATA IS IMPORTANT. DRIVER FEELING IS INSTRUMENTAL”

Although Glickenhaus is an American brand, its race cars are built in Italy at Podium Advanced Technologies. Luca Ciancetti is the company’s head of engineering and leads the hypercar project. During the SCG LMH007 roll out he explains the ins and outs of developing a race car.

As it is only the first test, we’re rolling out the car and ensuring all of the primary functions work correctly. This test is definitely not about performance. We test and calibrate all the main systems such as the engine and drivetrain and subsystems like cooling and tyres. When designing this car, we have set several performance targets and we need to make sure that we achieve all of our initial targets before we can really start to look at speed.

The hypercar is an entirely new category and concept. There is nothing we can look back at to compare it to. We started with a clean sheet. We need to build a car that performs well across the board, therefore we are also relying on a performance oil brand as Motul to keep the inside of the engine in perfect shape. It’s a very steep challenge but one that is a lot of fun as well.

Once we know that all the systems work as they should, we can look at speed and start tyre testing with Michelin. The final step would be to look at reliability and endurance. To achieve this, we’ll do a 30-hour test so we can make sure the car will last 24 hours and more.

No matter how much data we have, the feedback of the driver is instrumental in this process. Having someone like Romain Dumas roll out the car is great because his feedback is very detailed, and his experience means that he knows what to look for in a winning endurance machine. We’re also very happy to have Franck here because he’s been with us for over five years, we know him very well, and he knows how the team works.