Right now, one of this year’s biggest races is heading into what is hopefully a thrilling final chapter.
The 2024 edition of the Le Mans 24 Hours has been shaping up to be one for the ages with many of the 23 hypercar entries realistically in contention for overall victory heading into the weekend.Despite a slow start to the hypercar era, where just five cars competed in the category the first time it raced at Le Mans in 2021, it has grown to become the most well-represented top class that the world famous endurance race has seen for decades.
Unlike the previous LMP1 class, which was dominated by Audi, Porsche, then Toyota once the German manufacturers departed, several teams can potentially be in the fight for victory in hypercar this year. The three opening rounds of the championship this year have seen three different teams on top of the podium – Penske Porsche, Toyota and Jota Porsche – with Ferrari, Cadillac, Alpine and BMW represented in the first three rows of this weekend’s race. At time of writing – before the race starts – any one of these teams could be considered as having a shot at victory.
This unprecedented level of competition can be explained by one critical factor: Balance of Performance (BoP). Although manufacturers of LMH hypercars have freedom to design their chassis and aerodynamics – as opposed to LMDh hypercars also eligible for Le Mans but focused on the IMSA sportscar championship and its marquee Daytona 24 Hours endurance race – the governing body make active adjustments to the allowed parameters that each car can run to, mainly when it comes to car weight or power output.
The FIA insists BoP is not intended to try and punish those who achieve success in hypercar or to give a leg-up to teams or cars that are notably off the pace, but instead about equalising the potential performance of a car. The same philosophy has also been applied to the GT3 class for many years, long before it became the official category for GT racing in the World Endurance Championship.
Naturally, the system is controversial. Last year, Toyota won every round of last year’s WEC but one – the Le Mans 24 Hours – following BoP adjustments brought in after the race at Spa-Francorchamps. This came after the series organisers originally promised BoP would remain untouched between the start of the championship and Le Mans. Instead, Ferrari took pole position and ultimately prevailed to win the race on their return to Le Mans, much to the frustration of Toyota, whose chairman said they had “lost to politics”.
Many sports around the world have rules and measures in place to try and promote parity of competition – even Formula 1, which introduced aerodynamic testing restrictions in 2021 that limits the volume of wind tunnel and CFD testing that teams can do in a season based on their results in the previous championship. BoP is different as it is actively applied to cars based on their specific performance parameters and regularly adjusted, rather than being applied passively depending on results.
Although the BoP adjustments appear to have created this intense competition that endurance racing has longed for since the peak of LMP1 in the mid-2010s, it remains a controversial system. But does BoP go against the spirit of motorsport as an engineering competition, or is it a net positive for the World Endurance Championship?
For
Competition is the lifeblood in motorsport. Does it really matter if hypercar is slower and less technically advanced than LMP1 if more manufacturers and teams have a chance to win?
The FIA says BoP is not a ‘rubber band’ system to allow poor performing cars a boost and Peugeot’s plight over the last two seasons proves that. Plus, the BoP does not take into account team and driver performance outside of the parameters of the cars themselves.
BoP works for teams and drivers, by giving more a chance of competing against the biggest manufacturers; for the organisers, who can attract more entries from big names; and for the fans, who have more exciting racing.
Against
As an event that was created to push cars and their creators to the limits, one that has been credited with many great technical innovations over the decades, the idea that the competition at Le Mans should be generated in such an artificial manner is a shame.
The legendary success that brands like Audi and Porsche enjoyed over the years were because they were able to flex their superior engineering muscles. These days, they would be artificially restricted by BoP.
As long as a team is within the technical regulations, they should not be held back in any way. At least then at the end of the 24 hours, everyone can be truly sure the best team won.
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I say
In an ideal world, there would be no need for Balance of Performance. We do not live in that ideal world.
Having some kind of mechanism in place to ensure that one team does not end up dominating – like seen with Audi and even Toyota a few years ago – simply because it has far more resources to win a development war than its more modest rivals is likely the best option for the sport and its spectators. And when teams like Toyota still dominate a championship despite BoP being in effect, that just makes their achievement all the more impressive.
It’s never going to be a perfect system and organisers must be vigilant about striving to ensure it is applied in the fairest and more accurate way possible, but it’s sometimes better to have something that provides the potential for excitement than to not have it at all.
You say
Does Balance of Performance belong in the World Endurance Championship? Have your say in this weekend’s poll and cast your vote below.
Has BoP been a positive or negative change for the WEC's hypercar class?
- No opinion (2%)
- Very negative (20%)
- Slightly negative (14%)
- Neutral (9%)
- Slightly positive (36%)
- Very positive (20%)
Total Voters: 81
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Debates and polls
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EffWunFan (@cairnsfella)
16th June 2024, 9:40
In principle I’d be against. The idea that a team may spend substantial amounts and have highly skilled staff honing race winning machinery, only to have the conceptual result determined by a handicap that – regardless of the basis of calculation – retains an arbitrary element, does wrankle somewhat. Indeed I am personally unconvinced that the Ferrari result last year was representative of fair BoP application.
On the other hand given the ‘endurance’ nature of the sport it does make some sense to bring the field a little closer together, though (as I intimated aboive) it certainly shouldnt be used to entirely eradicate the competitive advantage of a team that has developed better than others.
So overall, and admitedlly in slight deference to the spectacle, I settled upon ‘slightly positive’.
Euro Brun (@eurobrun)
16th June 2024, 12:06
Skilled staff, I agree with, but simply spending more shouldn’t immediately equal success (not that it did with Toyota in F1!). I don’t believe that there is currently a cost cap in WEC, but arguably there should be.
anon
16th June 2024, 14:06
@eurobrun there is not a hard cost cap in the WEC, but there are measures in place that means there is an indirect cost cap in place – for example, there are restrictions on private testing, homologation requirements and limitations on personnel headcounts that indirectly limit the maximum amount that can be spent by a manufacturer.
The objective by the ACO and FIA was to significantly slash spending to about €20 million per year, including allowing for development time (I believe that the ACO and FIA estimated that the heaviest spenders, thought to have been Audi and Porsche, were spending around €140 million a year on the LMP1 regulations). The indirect measures introduced to discourage excessive spending and the lower overall costs of competing means that a fixed budget cap is seen as largely unnecessary.
EffWunFan (@cairnsfella)
17th June 2024, 0:59
@eurobrun Very fair point. However what I really meant – but clearly did not convey – by the expenditure comment is that even if they all spent the same, there is still a lot of money involved, and it pains me that the progress the investments reap are then reined back in. If it were a spec formula, greater similarity would exist by default and a lot of money could be saved (Though I am not arguing for spec cars, I am just making the comparison).
MichaelN
16th June 2024, 9:41
No, these days there would be five cars in such a class, like in 2021. Two of which from the only manufacturer, the rest at best the work of passionate amateurs, at worst an old outdated and grandfathered-in car from a previous spec.
The non-BoP top class in Le Mans is no longer viable. It’s unfortunate, perhaps, but it’s just not a real alternative.
As automotive technology has reached near-full maturity, it has shifted R&D to safety, comfort and now automation. It no longer makes sense to spend 100million on a sportscar team, and thus it no longer happens.
Euro Brun (@eurobrun)
16th June 2024, 12:09
Fully agree. I don’t want 5 top class cars simply hoping to stay mechanicallly sound, whilst the clock winds down. Nor do I want to see 2nd class cars winning outright simply due to poor numbers, and not for something truly remarkable.
If the Le Mans 24hr wasn’t already an established historic event, I imagine it would never get off the ground as a concept today!
RandomMallard
16th June 2024, 16:19
Yeah this is where I stand as well. I regard BOP as a necessary evil, a little bit like DRS in my mind. However, I much prefer BOP to DRS because I can leave BOP in the back of my mind, while DRS is always front and centre in a battle. I grew into watching sportscars during the era where LMP1 was dying – in the first 3 Le Mans I watched, the closest anyone who wasn’t a Toyota finished was 5 laps down on the leader. I’ve just finished watching a battle between 4 cars from 2 different manufacturers that went right down to the final stint, with 9 cars finishing on the lead lap, where at least 4 manufacturers were competitive through at least most of the race.
Would I prefer BOP to be slightly less of a factor? Yeah, it would be nice.
Would I prefer it if there could be some sort of a middle ground between Hypercar and LMP1 (both in terms of BOP and performance)? Yes, absolutely.
But compared to what we had just 5 or 6 years ago, I find it very difficult to complain with the current ruleset.
BC
16th June 2024, 10:00
BOP is a complete turn off, albeit I’m not a regular watcher of endurance racing given my limited attention span and the fact that it means less to me because you can’t get to know the drivers like in F1.
There must be a middle ground between the expense of LMP1; tighter regulations and a budget cap.
I’d much rather have 5 manufacturer teams under those conditions than the soon to be 10 Hypercar manufacturers we have now.
Coventry Climax
16th June 2024, 10:34
It’s made me stop watching. Period.
kuvemar
16th June 2024, 15:28
And it made me start watching. I literally just spent 18 hours watching a race I couldn’t be bothered with a few years ago.
sam
16th June 2024, 17:34
Watching 18 hours of anything is bizarre.
Nick T.
17th June 2024, 15:16
How dare he really enjoy the race?!
Mark Thomson (@melthom)
16th June 2024, 21:44
+1
Maisch (@maisch)
16th June 2024, 10:59
Same as other commenters, i just can’t get engaged in it with the BOP factor, its complicated, constantly changing and ruins the whole point of having different cars in there. Its hard to know if a team actually does something excellent or just have a BOP advantage for that certain track.
Alan Dove
16th June 2024, 11:33
What we have now is a bit like an excellent cover band. The race is wearing the costume of its past. It’s entertaining, if somewhat passively so. It lacks the cultural and meaningful impact of what it used to be. So BoP does devalue the event, but we’re at a stage now where organisers are having to get grids, and Endurance Racing has run its course to some degree as a true sporting spectacle. It can’t be denied that BoP has worked at delivering a grid of cars, and that’s really the intended goal.
MichaelN
16th June 2024, 13:49
Indeed, it’s just the nature of things. Is it possible to create a series today where technical innovation truly matters? Yeah…. kinda? There are a lot of constraints in play; money, safety, desired levels of driver input, venues. It all adds up to make the kind of series that existed decades ago (near) impossible today. You can even add the change in how desirable it is for ‘generic consumer’ to be associated with motorsport as a further limitation on what is possible.
F1 is able to escape this (for now) because it is riding a historic wave of epic proportions. It can still afford to hand 1.2 billion a year to its teams, to spend on “developing” largely pointless aero-gimmicks. But engine development? Not allowed. Tyre development? Not allowed. Suspension development? Only within dozens of fixed parameters.
F1 “development” is not real development. It’s not pushing any technical boundaries. The last genuinely interesting tech it had was the MGU-H, and that was over a decade ago and has now even been scrapped for 2026. What passes for development in F1 is largely refinement. Even first year mechanical or aerospace engineering students could pinpoint a dozen points where the current design of F1 cars are mediocre at best, and plain outdated at worst.
That’s not necessarily bad. It is largely an entertainment show. But it does diminish the myth of the competition when parts of it are no longer in play. Whether that’s BoP at Le Mans, or the engine freeze in F1, or the spec chassic in Indycar.
Coventry Climax
16th June 2024, 18:06
Interesting analogy, which brings me to one of those cover bands: The analogues, a Beatles clone. They go to extreme lengths to figure out exactly what instruments and things the Fab Four used originally, to the point e.g. where they investigate what anvil and hammer were used to create the ‘bang bang’ sound in Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Then they use that to create as close a copy as they can of the original music.
It’s amazing they achieve such perfection and to be present when an album is performed live is nice to the point of magical even, to some at least, but when push comes to shove, it’s a completely pointless exercise. Nothing new and original is created, and you can just as easily put a record or CD on.
Artistically, “original-wise” if you like, things are getting even worse with AI, which can only create permutations from and across other content that has been amassed in a huge database, and then subsequently is labelled and and sold as ‘new’ – and without any technical need (moral need is a different matter, gladly ignored by the big tech companies) to pay the original artists any royalties. The technique is amazing, the result saddening and- like you said- devaluating the true and original artists.
I accept things change. And some things just die, and then something else will come along filling the gap. I’m fine with that, but I’m not fine with them claiming the robe and grandeur of the deceased.
It’s not “The King is dead, long live the King”, it’s “The King is dead; let’s see how long the kitchen aid lasts”. And how much money we can scrape from it, ofcourse.
Nick T.
17th June 2024, 15:17
That’s some very cool dedication to fidelity.
S
16th June 2024, 11:57
As with all things, there’s both an upside and a downside to BoP.
On the positive side, it fosters closer on-track competition while retaining and encouraging significant technical diversity.
On the negative side, it’s a bit of a paradigm shift in the style of competition – in terms of the principles involved, at least.
And that’s ultimately why some people who don’t like it – the principle of it more than the reality and result of it.
Regardless, the fact is that manufacturers now have little interest in throwing bucketloads of money at racing projects only to still not be achieving results and garnering positive media attention.
Without BoP in one form or another, those series simply aren’t viable – this is the modern reality.
lynn-m
16th June 2024, 13:45
BOP is one of the key reasons I no longer watch WEC or Le Mans.
It’s nothing but artificial manipulation that can be used to manipulate the results.
Go back to the 2000s for example and look at the lengths the ACO went to to try & gift Pescarolo a win by handicapping the Audi’s so badly that they were barely faster than the LMGT cars on the straights. And it just got more & more ridiculous each year with the handicaps getting more & more pathetic. Fortunately the attempts to manipulate the results to get a French win never worked out because the Pescarolo team was simply never as well organised & kept somehow missing the open goal the ACO had gifted them.
If a team can build a car that is faster than the rest they should be allowed to reap the rewards from that, That is what this SPORT (Thats now a show) is supposed to be about, It’s the very DNA of Le Mans & all the past great champions must be turning in their graves over this pathetic artificially manipulated show that this once great race has become.
anon
16th June 2024, 14:31
lynn-m, there was a lot more manipulation in that supposedly “pure sporting era” that you seem to be blindly ignoring.
It is pretty widely known now that the VW Group paid Porsche off to not compete at Le Mans during that era – Porsche spend the better part of two decades denying the existence of the 9R3 LMP900 car, before it was finally allowed to be shown to the public in 2018. Michelin was pretty open at times that it wanted Audi to win – because Audi was not only seen as more prestigious, but was also an important commercial partner for Michelin – and actively biased the design of their tyres towards them.
The irony is that, whilst you claim that the ACO was trying to gift Pescarolo a win, the ACO did plenty to help Audi out over the years. Even Audi itself basically had to admit that, when the R10 was first introduced and turned out to be overweight, the ACO increased the minimum weight to ensure that Audi wouldn’t be at a disadvantage (not to mention the head of the ACO at the time admitting they rigged the regulations in favour of diesel powered cars too).
Coventry Climax
16th June 2024, 18:24
Anon, you’re not disproving lynn-m ‘s point, you’re only proving they failed to solve other issues, or even actively steered towards such situations.
e.g. Michelin openly favouring Audi for the win is OK, as long as other tyre manufactureres are allowed to compete as well and come up with what they think is best for the teams they provide the tyres for.
I might have agreed with something like, e.g., the tyre (or any components) manufacturers being subjected to a budget cap, but clearly, that’s not the route they choose.
It makes more sense to say: “You can come up with anything you like, but may only spend so much doing that”, than saying “We don’t care how much each of you spend, but the end products will be equalised”.
They’ve choosen the latter, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with sports anymore.
anon
16th June 2024, 22:31
Coventry Climax, it was to make the point that lynn-m is choosing to idealise the past with an unrealistically romanticised image that pretends things were “purer” than they really were. The past rarely was as noble and heroic as people like to claim it was as they project an idealised image of their ideological position back onto a messier and less clear cut world, and quite often individuals like lynn-m are rather reluctant to admit to the problems that existed then that spoil the idealised history that they present.
Coventry Climax
16th June 2024, 23:21
That may all very well be true, but it’s still no excuse for the turn they’ve taken. Instead of cleaning things up, or ‘solve other issues’ as I worded it, they taken what I thibnk of as the easy way out, and it’s now more manipulated than ever before. Time will tell if this period too, will get ‘over romanticised’ in a decade or so, but personally, I highly doubt it.
PeterG
16th June 2024, 13:49
I used to be a huge fan of sportscar/endurance racing but it’s something i no longer bother watching primarily because of the balance of performance.
Why should i take a series seriously if you never know if the result is due to a team producing a good car or because they were the benefactors of that weekends bop change. it’s just impossible to take seriously as a genuine sporting competition because of that.
Yaru (@yaru)
16th June 2024, 14:05
I think the current BoP is too strong. It needs to be weakened more. As it is, it’s too controversial and comes at the worse times.
Ideally it wouldn’t be needed at all but sadly some level of it would be.
notagrumpyfan
16th June 2024, 14:25
BoP doesn’t belong in any top level sports competition.
Some sports have it for the amateurs (eg Golf), but even they know it doesn’t belong at the professional/top level.
Señor Sjon
16th June 2024, 15:22
This year, teams kept close. It felt very artificial. Just like the Virtual Energy Tank is really putting me off.
A few years back, wasn’t it the GT40 remake that won a debut? With tailored BoP just to make sure they had the best odds.
Roger Ayles (@roger-ayles)
16th June 2024, 15:59
The issue with BOP is that even if changes aren’t been made to specifically help or hurt certain manufacturers it all too often does seem to have a big effect one way or the other which leads to constant yo-yoing of teams performance and more often than not it just feels like car performance is been dominated by the whims of the officials rather than the skill of teams & drivers.
Results just end up feeling a bit artificial somehow and that is the biggest problem. Is a result down to the skill of the teams & drivers or down to some teams getting benefits from one of the seemingly weekly BOP changes. It’s that perception that puts many off. I want to come away applauding a teams efforts rather than wondering how much of a result is down to them been given more power or others having more restrictions added to them.
And the fact BOP has become the big talking point is has every race highlights that it’s clearly an issue because it never used to be something that needed to be talked about as much as it now does.
NinjaBadger (@ninjabadger)
16th June 2024, 16:14
I think the amount of participants in Hypercar is a testament to the current rules.
A variety of cars, with a variety of designs competing.
Its not a “get out of jail free” situation. You still need to build a competitive car.
BoP hasn’t suddenly made BMW or Lamborghini front runners. Or meant nobody has to develop their car (see Peugeot).
It makes it so you can enter and compete, while knowing a manufacture can’t suddenly turn up with a moneypit rocketship and trigger a spending war.
Races come down to how the teams perform on the day.
If there wasn’t a competition for the win, noone would watch, so noone would see the point of entering, or developing, As we saw when Toyota had the top category to itself. Effectively making LMP1 an exhibition that could have been an email.
Is it perfect? No. Of course not. A perfect ruleset doesn’t exist. Especially when it comes to having the mountain of variables between all the cars kept competitive.
But is it good watching bunch of drivers and teams push each other for the race distance? Yes. And you can see what it means to win.
MichaelN
16th June 2024, 16:38
Yeah, I think that gets underplayed. There’s a pretty clear running order that’s fairly consistent. Toyota and Ferrari have great all-round cars, Porsche is almost up there. Cadillac is quick but lacks a bit over longer distances. BMW and Lamborghini have some work to do. Peugeot lacks pace on all but a few very specific tracks. Alpine still a bit of a question mark.
NinjaBadger (@ninjabadger)
16th June 2024, 17:51
And like in F1, I forgot Alpine was there. :P
NinjaBadger (@ninjabadger)
16th June 2024, 17:50
I fully see why someone would find BoP offputting.
Especially when it comes to “For the next race, this team is allowed this, this team is allowed that…”
But compared to what we had before the rules came into force, the Hypercar class is in a far healthier state than LMP1 was in.
Coventry Climax
16th June 2024, 18:41
What you call variety here is now essentially just like the difference between the pawns you use to play ‘Ludo’ (Mensch, ärgere dich nicht / Mens erger je niet, for the non-english among us): Identical, but for the color.
They could mix up a playing field of Citroën 2CV’s, Morris Mini’s, Opel Kadett’s, VW Beetles, Fiat 500’s and what not for a racigg series, and make it such that they all perform equally.
Entertaining enough to see once, maybe, but at the chequered flag each round, it wouldn’t ever be ‘The best car won’.
NinjaBadger (@ninjabadger)
16th June 2024, 19:17
But could you say the best drivers won? Or the best team won?
Toyota – 3.5L TwinTurbo V6, Ferrari – 3.0L TwinTurbo 120degree V6, Porsche – 4.6L TwinTurbo V8, Cadillac – 5.5L NA V8, BMW – 4.0L TwinTurbo V8, Alpine – 3.4L Turbo V6, Lamborghini – 3.8L TwinTurbo V8, Peugeot – 2.6L TwinTurbo V6.
What’s that? A variety of engines designs?
Coventry Climax
17th June 2024, 12:08
No, with ‘the best car’ won I meant to say team/driver-car combination. A car by itself doesn’t win LeMans or F1 for that matter. Yet, I must add, thank heaven.
But if to you, a concept isn’t true because there’s some room for detail picking, I can do that too:
Variety of engine design? That largely depends on your definitions of variety as well as design. Which is why I just said “detail picking”.
Because I’d say: Nope, no variety; they’re all Otto cycle ICE’s, running on the same fuel, with 6 out of 8 (75%) being twin turbo.
Basically, the larger scale commercially available ICE’s (Otto, Diesel, etc.) haven’t really changed design since their inception in the 1800’s. There’s types/concepts invented as early as the late 1700’s already. And the latest type is probably the Wankel rotary engine, 1950’s. Then there’s Lenoir, Watt, and a whole host of others. The first hydrogen engine dates back to 1807, and it was put into the first ever(!) automobile in 1808. So nothing new here as well.
Some designs have been long been discarded, the others have all been improved and expanded on over the years alright, but they’re still the same design, with limits to their efficiency governed by the laws of thermodynamic (meaning that’s not a belief, opinion or religion).
Additional techniques merely try to regain/recuperate the energy that’s either inherently lost by the ICE process, or by slowing down the vehicle using friction.
Back to BoP: That’s the term for equalising team/car/driver-combination performances, inherently down to the lowest standard that was entered in the competition: They have no means to add to the performance of entries, only to take away from the others.
CarWars (@maxv)
18th June 2024, 13:59
If you are seriously arguing that engine design has not evolved you haven’t kept up with technology..
Coventry Climax
18th June 2024, 19:43
@maxv
If you’re seriously saying that’s what you read from my post, you haven’t developed any reading skills.
Dane
16th June 2024, 16:55
It’s a tough call, but ultimately an engineering competition is less exciting than the competition on the track for me. That’s what keeps fans in the stands and viewers on TV.
Doh
16th June 2024, 16:55
I enjoy tuning into lemans regardless but following wec as a series is a bit harder with the way bop is. Maybe that’s the only way they can make it work and also have so many manufacturers but it’s hard to follow it as a sport if you don’t know exactly how bop works in that it changes all the time and isn’t concrete like for example btcc. Not that it should be like that… But at the end of the day it reduces the appeal for me.
Bob
16th June 2024, 17:18
In an ideal world, the WEC would have the current grid with the old LMP1H regulations, however, currently it’s not popular enough for manufactures to be spending F1 money on it. So, for now BoP is a necessary evil to keep costs down and competition high to attract both fans and manufacturers. The result so far has been amazing though, so no complaints on my end.
Hopefully, if it becomes popular enough with fans, then we can have rules that allow for a development battle. But we need more fans to watch it so that manufacturers are willing to spend a lot more money to, for many of them, not even fight for wins. We also need the fans to stay even if there’s no competition like they do in F1. Getting enough support for the short term is easy, keeping it when 1 manufacturer dominates isn’t, and we need to keep that longevity.
I honestly do think we’re slowly heading that way though with the renewed popularity and growth, but costs will need to be kept well below F1 and competition (which is driving the renewed interest) needs to be maintained. Perhaps the next set of regulations can replace the BoP with a cost cap (that’s much lower than F1’s). Keeping the development jokers would help keep costs down, and if the number is tied to the championship points it could help with competition in a similar system to F1’s with the wind tunnel and CFD allowances. Especially if they had major and minor jokers.
In saying that, I wouldn’t complain if they kept the current system, it’s working really well and I honestly don’t think those complaining about it have watched a single WEC race with the new regulations. It’s also important to note that the only non-spec series without a BoP (or equivalent such as success ballast) is NASCAR and F1. Both have been increasing the show aspect (especially NASCAR which sadly hardly seems like a sport now), and that’s something the WEC lacks. Those saying BoP is a deal breaker would likely only watch those series (it’d seem odd to be fine with spec but not BoP since they’re virtually the same), and honestly for them I suspect it’s the lack of a show that’s boring them more than the BoP. The length of the races and time in between each one probably doesn’t help most people either.
That’s not to say it’s everyone or to try to shut down complaints, I’m sure there’s some who loved the LMP1H era that don’t like the LMH era due to BoP. I just think it’s probably a bigger factor than BoP for those who are only fans of F1 or NASCAR. I don’t think it’s a bad thing either, I think F1 has nailed the balance between sport and show. It’s entertaining enough as a show to entertain anyone, while still being a proper sport. Well, they could do a better job at stewarding and not creating drama/controversy around bad calls, then it’d be perfect. I just think the real question should be about whether or not the WEC should try to create more of a show or stick to its routes of being a sport. It wouldn’t drum up as much discussion as the BoP does though.
MichaelN
16th June 2024, 23:22
Part of the reason for BoP was that the original Hypercar idea was quite a bit more extreme than what the current state of the field suggests. It was closer to “Concept car”, in a way. the idea being that manufacturers could bring very iconic designs to the track. But the current designs have all converged on a pretty similar design. In some ways it’s closer to the American DPi than LMP.
Speaking of non-BoP sites; the derisive attitude of some F1 fans to BoP is a bit awkward when F1 itself has a BoP-like equivalence scheme for its “no development allowed”-engines. As pointed out above, LMH and LMDh have an enormous variety of engines. Development is just not aimed at outright power. But it’s a much more open turks than F1, where everything from cylinders to mounting screws is heavily prescribed.
greasemonkey
16th June 2024, 19:45
BoP should **BE** the scoring for manufacturers. Whatever manufacturer has the heaviest BoP wins whatever manufacturer title there is. IOW, manufacturers strive to get hit harder with BoP….that would be how they win.
This could apply to F1 too, to make the drivers championship part not be so stupid.
greasemonkey
16th June 2024, 19:49
And yes that does mean the glory of the single event win for a manufacturer means less. It already does mean less to nothing. That ship sailed. Who cares that Ferrari won in any sense that Ferrari the manufacturer did a better job than anyone else? There is no signal left in it, by design. That is what BoP is designed to do. Hence, BoP is itself the measurement of how a manufacturer is doing. SO make that be the manufacturer scoring system.
FlyingLap (@flyinglapp)
16th June 2024, 22:47
F1 doesn’t have BoP which must be why the racing is so close, with no single team dominating.
Alan Dove
17th June 2024, 7:44
It does have the resource allocation rules which acts to ‘balance’ teams. I don’t like it, but it is BoP by another means.
FlyingLap (@flyinglapp)
17th June 2024, 16:46
I don’t think you got my sarcasm.
RoverT
17th June 2024, 2:24
BoP is alive and well in F1: DRS, limited number of tyres, cost cap, wind tunnel / dev hours. If a team has poor aero or engine it is effectively damned for the year because of restrictions. It may not be as directly active as Hypercar but it has ruined F1. The days Lotus, Tyrrell and Williams innovation are gone to be able to entertain the masses and keep manufacturers happy.
MichaelN
17th June 2024, 10:26
It’s indeed a different way to go about achieving many of the same goals. F1’s cap on testing hours is a form of ‘success balast’ that is indeed tied directly to the success of a team; it’s a punishment of sorts.
BoP isn’t fantastic. But what’s been surprising is that people contrast it with an imaginary series without any restrictions that has, essentially, never existed. Not even going back a hundred years.
dragoll (@dragoll)
17th June 2024, 6:28
I’m torn on this, and as such didn’t vote. I think its a complicated issue that cannot be summed up as “good” or “bad”. There are pros and cons as highlighted in this article. I think we can all agree that we don’t want a team with unlimited funds to come in and dominate based on their wallet, we want to see ingenuity, hard work and great drivers battling it out on track. Maybe instead of BoP they should implement a Cost Cap instead, and while no cost cap is ever going to be perfect, at least it would eliminate a team with unlimited funds from coming in and buying their win.
jmlabareda
18th June 2024, 17:31
What we have now is way better than what we had before.