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Given Toyota's clear pace advantage last time out in the FIA World Endurance Championship, at Interlagos in mid-July, the fact they've been hit with both power and weight loses for this weekend's race at the Circuit of the Americas makes sense.
They've been given an extra 5kg of weight, plus lost 9kW of power — roughly 12 horsepower.
In comparison, their main rivals, Ferrari and Porsche, haven't been hit as much. Ferrari's lost 5kg of weight, but has also 3kW of power. Porsche, on the other hand, have lost both, gaining 2kg and losing 3kW of power.
So, what does this mean for the competitiveness? It's hard to truly say given the WEC circus hasn't visited COTA since 2020, meaning both the current crop of top class prototypes have never raced here, and neither have the GT3 cars in their LMGT3 configuration.
Last time out at Interlagos, the gap between the fastest Toyota and the fastest non-Toyota, the #12 JOTA Porsche, in the race was around six tenths a lap. In qualifying, over a single lap, this shrunk to just under two tenths of a second.
Predicting COTA lap times
In 2020's case, due to success ballast, Toyota were on the back foot and Rebellion won the race, with the #1 Rebellion of Gustavo Menezes, Bruno Senna, and Norman Nato enjoying a handy 51 second advantage over the #8 Toyota, which featured Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley, and the now-retired Kazuki Nakajima.
The pole lap time for the #1 Rebellion was 1:47.530. Of course, comparing this is hard since we don't know what the Hypercars are capable of around COTA.
At 2020's previous race, the 8 Hours of Bahrain, the pole lap was a 1:42.979, again from the #1 Rebellion. Last year at Bahrain, the pole lap was 1:46.564, so around three and a half seconds slower than the LMP1 cars.
So, this weekend, we can expect lap times in qualifying at around the low 1:50 mark, maybe 1:51s.
With this weight/power adjustments for the top three cars — Ferrari, Toyota, and Porsche — this gap should shrink. It's hard to say how much by, but the purpose of BoP is to close the gap covered by the field, in order to increase competitiveness.
Further down the field
Elsewhere, Peugeot have had a huge weight break, losing 14kg compared to Interlagos. While they finished eighth at Interlagos, the new 9X8's best result so far since its introduction at Imola in April, this was mostly down to strategy.
The team's understanding of the car and subsequently their pace is improving — but maybe not at the level that their Interlagos result said it was. It will be interesting to see how the weight break helps — however, they've also lost 1kW of power. That said, the 14kg reduction in weight should help them more than losing a little bit of power.
Alpine, BMW, Cadillac and Lamborghini have also seen their weight and power adjusted. Cadillac have been relatively quick this season, qualifying in amongst the Toyotas, Ferraris, and Porsches, but in race's either bad luck or operational errors have let them down. They've lost 2kg in weight but also lost 1kW of power, so they may well be in the mix again pace-wise — but will need to cut out the errors to get a good result.
Alpine and BMW have been similar pace this year. Alpine have lost 3kg for COTA, but BMW have lost 7kg, giving them an advantage on weight – but BMW have also gained a kW of power while Alpine have lost 1kW. A wash? We'll see.
Finally, Lamborghini. Generally amongst the slowest cars this year, they've lost 9kg of weight and gained a kW of power. This should help them move closer to the pack, as BoP is designed to do. Let's see if it works.
Unfortunately Isotta Fraschini have pulled out for the rest of the season — a shame given their pace was slowly improving. Although that may have been at least partially down to BoP, they get credit where it's due for their increasing understanding of the car, and for finishing Le Mans with no issues, first time out.
Two-stage power BoP
The key to note for the still-new two-stage BoP process for power gain (or loss) after 250kph is Toyota will gain 1.8% more power after 250kph, compared to Interlagos.
Ferrari, on the other hand, will only gain 0.1% more than at Interlagos, and Porsche remain at 0.7%. This means Toyota gains 4.6% power after the car reaches 250kph, while Ferrari gain 1.9% and Porsche 0.7%.
Alpine will lose 3.2%, BMW -0.9%, Cadillac -0.6%, and Peugeot 1.2%. Lamborghini won't lose or gain power after 250kph at all.
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