PRUETT: The Rolex 24 rewind...Racers trying to escape the bottom of the officials port-a-potty that IMSA BOP puts them into.
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Marshall Pruett | February 3, 2022 10:03 PM ET
BALANCE OF BAMBOOZLING
You should have heard the comments during the Roar Before The 24 and again when the Balance of Performance adjustments were published days before the big race. Some of those voices, be it from team owners or manufacturer representatives, gave the impression that
IMSA had committed heinous crimes by saddling their cars with added weight, or killed any chances of being competitive by taking power away for the 24-hour contest.
The fun part of listening to the annual ‘WHY DOES IMSA HATE ME?’ cries at Daytona is knowing that at least one of those poor teams or auto brands will end up winning the race overall or taking a class victory. This magically happens like clockwork each January, despite being handcuffed by IMSA’s ‘unfairly biased’ BoP.
There’s another aspect behind the motivations for those cries, and it’s to mask the team or brand’s efforts to hide their car’s true potential. What better way to cause a distraction than by shouting to all who’ll listen that you may as well pack up and go home before the race, all while secretly holding a winning hand in the BoP poker game that gets played between the series and its entrants?
Giving evidence against yourself
IMSA implores its teams and manufacturers to go as hard as possible throughout the Roar in order to give the series’ technical team accurate performance information to use while formulating the BoP for each model, but the games continue to be played by some. IMSA monitors so many aspects of the onboard telemetry that it’s hard to get away with something blatant during the Roar like lifting off the throttle or dragging the brakes on the straights to reduce top speed and increase lap time to create a false portrait of the car’s capabilities. Once those obvious manipulations were lost as options, more inventive efforts were made to try and make IMSA believe certain cars needed significant BoP handouts to have a fighting chance in the race.
One sneaky ploy involved f
illing the fuel tank far beyond what the car needed for a test run; if five gallons were needed (at approximately seven pounds per gallon), some teams tried to trick IMSA by slowing their cars down by dropping double or triple the amount into the tank. A few even made sure to keep their cars topped up at all times. Thanks to the extra and unnecessary fuel weight, the car would run a few tenths slower per lap as the telemetry showed the driver giving 100-percent effort to paint the portrait of the BoP being in need of adjustment.
But then I
MSA started randomly weighing the cars after those test runs, and on more than one occasion, it asked teams to explain why so much fuel was onboard…
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The reply from Smokey Yunick would be: "Cause it's not illegal, you GD MF'ers!"
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Those manufacturers’ BoP pleas were dismissed. Another area of manipulation was found with over inflating the tires to reduce grip—in an exaggerated sense, it was like turning them into balloons — to negatively affect lap times.
There are other tire and suspension adjustment efforts like this that were caught and brought to an end, which takes us to some of the newer ways I heard were used during the Roar to avoid the bottom of the IMSA officials porta-potty, and receive a real BoP break for the Rolex 24.
One of the artful approaches involves a manufacturer manipulating the activation of its turbocharger anti-lag system. With anti-lag being used to keep a turbo (or turbos) spooled up and ready for instant action after the driver, say, lifts off the throttle and brakes entering the Bus Stop, anti-lag eliminates the brief wait for the exhaust gasses to flow and spin the turbines and make boost. But if the anti-lag didn’t engage, a car would accelerate slower once the driver got through the first portion of the Bus Stop and hammered the throttle to charge out of the corner and take the long trip on the banking to cross the start/finish line.
Think of it like two identical dragsters, one with an engine that rages sooner than the other off the line and has a faster elapsed time, and the second engine which takes a little longer to hit its top speed and reach the finish line.
They’d both hit the same top speed, but the first one would have the better E.T. In this scenario, losing anti-lag would present a false portrait of the car’s acceleration curve without triggering any significant alarms at IMSA, since the deeper engine functions and ECU settings are not believed to be within its monitoring capabilities.
You’d get glorious data showing drivers being super aggressive on the throttle and get top speeds that fall in line with expectations, but with the slower E.T. on the banking due to the disengaged anti-lag, it sure would help a team or manufacturer’s claims of needing more power for the race.
On a related note, another fun one I heard about, which isn’t necessarily new, was a brand
making sure its traction control system was working overtime during the Roar. Just as traction control can be a real help by reducing wheelspin under acceleration and thereby improving lap times, it can also be used as an intentional hindrance. Dialing TC down in order to allow excessive wheelspin and hurt lap times would be easy to spot by IMSA, but if you crank it up just slightly beyond what the driver really needs, you can ensure the rear tires have more grip than is optimal. With too much TC intervention, tiny additions of time are added to the lap while the tiny drifts are cut out of the acceleration profile.
Imagine having fractionally more grip and fractionally less acceleration through TC in the infield, or having fractionally less acceleration at high speed as the anti-lag is made to lag, and you just might sell the notion that your BoP needs-a-fixin’ leading into the race…
Look for IMSA to lock these areas down before we get to Sebring in March...or find new ways to shove racers into the bottom of the officials porta-potty.
Mmm-BoP. Yes, that was a Hanson reference. Richard Dole/Motorsport Images
MISC
* Look past the stellar races in four of the five Rolex 24 classes (LMP3 was all but decided on Saturday) and we had two perfect scene-setting results with Memo Gidley returning to Daytona for the first time since his giant crash to take pole and second in the IMSA Prototype Challenge LMP3 race with young ace Alex Koreiba. And then with Robert Wickens and Mark Wilkens claiming third on their debut as a twosome with Bryan Herta Autosport and Hyundai in the Michelin Pilot Challenge TCR class, it felt like no matter what happened across the 24-hour race, we’d already been gifted a pair of great feel-good stories.
* The MSR team spared plenty of thoughts and well wishes for 2012 Rolex 24 winner John Pew who was ill and unable to join the team in celebrating its win on the 10-year anniversary of their breakthrough at Daytona.
* I heard a few suggestions that the debuting McLaren 720S GT3s would be like endurance racing grenades, with their pins pulled at the start and barely a chance the two entries from inception racing and Crucial Motorsports would survive beyond three or four hours. The prophecies were partially accurate as the Crucial McLaren was addled with issues and fell out around the one-third point of the race. The lower case-loving inception squad defied the odds and took a strong fifth in GTD, two laps off the winning Wright Motorsport Porsche.
* On a related note, there were fears that in an all-pro class, Lexus and its large and somewhat aged RC F GT3 would be pummeled by the other factory entries. The Vasser Sullivan team finished third in GTD Pro.
* We’ll close with NBC’s broadcast of the race. Among the various items that stood out, commentator Calvin Fish appearing to call a Turn 1, lap 1 overtaking attempt a ‘Big d*** braking maneuver’ certainly opened the show with punch! Fans who watched with the automated closed-captioning function enabled reported Lamborghini driver Mirko Bortolotti’s last name was translated on the screen as Port-o-Potty, and a reference to ‘Sex with the Kink’ and other gems were also produced. Gallows humor and endurance racing—who could ask for more?
Lets go Brandon, F Joe Biden!