IMSA: Where you win and officials screw you out of it.
You bastards better NEVER complain about loss of fan popularity!
You bastards better NEVER complain about reduced entry fields!
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What's the lesson here? Doing too good of a job – even when the series agrees it was 100 percent legal – isn't acceptable within the constructs of a championship that relies on BoP.
Thursday, 01 February 2018
By Marshall Pruett / Images by LePage, Galstad, Levitt/LAT
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The decision by IMSA's technical department to award a stop-plus-five-minute penalty to the class-leading Land Motorsport Audi R8 LMS GT3 will be remembered as one of the bolder calls made at the Rolex 24 at Daytona.
Having spent a fair amount of time speaking with the series, team and manufacturer since the ruling was made, the complexities involved are remarkable.
As much as I loathe IMSA's use of Balance of Performance for its WeatherTech SportsCar Championship series, in this instance, I'm comfortable saying the spirit behind the call was correct – it fit the framework of BoP, which every entrant accepts as part of competing in the series.
But the penalty also exposed an oversight in IMSA's rulebook, which brought into question whether an actual, printed violation occurred.
WHAT HAPPENED
At 12:13 a.m., Land driver Jeffrey Schmidt
was ordered to pit lane to sit for five minutes as a result of the No.29 Audi spending an insufficient amount of time on pit lane while refueling. It might be the first example where fast pit stops, in a professional series where
no minimum time limits are imposed for pit stops, were met with a stiff penalty.
THE PROCESS
To understand the issue, a glimpse into IMSA's choice to use BoP as a method to equalize each class is required. Many fans are familiar with BoP in the context of how it applies to the cars in Prototype, GT Le Mans, and in this instance, GT Daytona.
Using GTD as a reference, the low and wide Lamborghini Huracan GT3, with its big V10 engine, competes against the comparatively narrow and tall Porsche 911 GT3 R with its smaller flat-six engine. Both cars cut through the air with differing efficiency, make different levels of horsepower and torque, and weigh different amounts.
Through BoP, IMSA uses a variety of data to try and equalize the on-track performance of Lamborghini and Porsche – and all other GTD cars – through adding or removing weight, aerodynamic settings, through air restrictors that give or take away power, through rev limits, and for the turbocharged cars from Acura, BMW, and Ferrari, boost is increased or decreased in an attempt to give each model an equal chance at winning.
If one model starts to perform outside its demonstrated capabilities – say, one model goes exceptionally faster in the race than it did in qualifying – the series has reserved the right, in its rulebook, to award a non-compliance penalty based on performing better than its BoP should allow.
As the penalty to the No.29 was applied, it was a rare BoP violation that had nothing to do with Land's Audi and its on-track performance. The speed of delivering fuel into the R8's 91-liter fuel cell during the first five pit stops was the instigator.
In its effort to balance the three classes on pit lane, IMSA takes live telemetry from the cars to gauge fuel consumption figures as the vehicles race around each track. Using the Lamborghini and Porsche again, if the Huracan's V10 consumes more fuel each lap than the 911 GT3 R's flat-six, IMSA would adjust the BoP tables to allow the Lamborghini to carry more fuel on board in its fuel cell.
And since it has a bigger fuel cell to fill, more fuel would be required to fill the Huracan at each stop than the Porsche, which would leave the Lamborghini sitting stationary longer than the Porsche, and that would be a clear disadvantage.