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Balance of Performance is one of those topics that divide people, in this case in the sportscar racing community.
Some say it artificially makes racing closer, that it’s a gimmick that should never have been introduced. Others say, if we want close racing — and who doesn’t? — BoP is the answer in this day and age.
A necessary evil?
Sportscar racing has often been dominated by a single manufacturer, with competition often coming in the form of smaller manufacturers.
“Racing has to be exciting to draw an audience”
Think back to the halcyon days of the Group C era in the 1980s. Initially, Porsche were the only real competitors in the class. In the first year of the regulations, in 1982, the winning Porsche 956 of Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx completed 359 laps. The second-placed Porsche was three laps down on 356, and the third-placed Porsche, dominating the podium, finished with 340.
In fourth, fifth and sixth were IMSA GTX cars — the GT class of its day, with the fourth-placed car 30 laps down.
The next Group C car, seventh overall but fourth in class, was a Nimrod NRA/C2, on 317 laps. That’s 42 laps down on the winning Porsche and 23 down on the Porsche in third place overall.
Another example is in the early 2000s, when LMP900 was the top class, preceding LMP1. The mighty Audi R8 was the car to have in those days.
In 2000, the first year the R8 competed (Audi debuted at Le Mans the previous year with two cars, the R8R and R8C), the winning R8, driven by Frank Biela, Emanuele Pirro and Tom Kristensen crossed the line on its 368th lap.
Much like Porsche 18 years previously, Audi achieved a 1-2-3, with the other two R8s on 367 and 365 laps respectively. The fourth-placed Courage C52, run by Pescarolo Sport, completed 344 laps — 24 laps down.
However, in 2005, the R8 was heavily pegged back, essentially in order to make a race of it and let other cars and teams have a chance (although this wasn’t the official reasoning). While Audi still won, the small Pescarolo team fought for victory for much of the race, including taking pole. They eventually finished two laps down.
Finally, a more recent example: Toyota, when Porsche and Audi had both abandoned LMP1 amid the dieselgate scandal, finished 12 laps ahead of the Rebellion R13 in third in 2018. The next year, the equivalence of technology — essentially pre-BoP in ACO parlance — was altered and the third-placed BR Engineering BR1 of SMP Racing finished six laps down. And in 2020, more equivalence of technology changes in favour of non-Toyotas saw Rebellion finish third in their final Le Mans, five laps down.
To get to the point: I don’t think many want to return to the days where the gap is measured in laps at Le Mans. The races in 2023 and 2024 have been all-time classic races, purely because of the depth of competition in both years, with this set to continue into at least 2025 and 2026.
“Manufacturer interest is because of BoP”
The reason the last two editions of the world’s greatest race (it just tips Indy 500, don’t @ me) is because of one thing: BoP.
Look at it from a manufacturer’s point of view. Balance of Performance, in theory, gives everyone an equal chance of winning. Now, in practice we know this isn’t the case — there are a great many things BoP doesn’t touch which can affect a car’s chances of winning. But it at least gives you a better chance than if it was just a straight development race.
The other side of the coin is spending and budgets. Without BoP, things can quickly degrade into an arms and spending race of who has the largest budget. Yes you can set a budget cap like Formula 1 has done, and development limits and all of those sorts of things. But BoP is a much simpler and often more effective way of getting to largely the same result: close, exciting racing between a variety of cars, teams, and manufacturers.
With eight major manufacturers in WEC this year, plus a small boutique manufacturer – who’s albeit pulled out, but nonetheless — the championship’s strategy has quite clearly worked. Compare this to the LMP1-H days, with Porsche, Audi and Toyota in the top class, alongside ByKolles and Rebellion with non-hybrid cars.
Now don’t get me wrong: the LMP1-H cars were incredible machines. Maybe my favourite ever racing cars. But they were also incredibly expensive and complex to develop and run, requiring, in the case of Porsche and Audi at least, budgets at or approaching F1 levels of spending. Simply put, WEC isn’t worth that. And while LMP1-H did have more manufacturers interested — remember when Peugeot were on the edge of entering? — it was simply too expensive.
Full-on Balance of Performance in the top class has meant there’s no real point spending money to make your car faster, because it’ll get pegged back if it’s too fast, in order to equalise it with the rest of the field. Instead, manufacturers spend money developing the cars, using Evo jokers, to improve handling, tyre wear, and reliability, for example.
"2024 has been the best WEC season ever"
2024 has seen some great racing. It's hard to say whether it has, objectively, been the best season ever — there are lots of factors involved there. I for one miss the mad LMP1s and the 8MJ they'd deploy on track, and the diesel Audi R18 being ridiculously quick but being barely audible compared to other cars.
But it's true there has been some great racing this year. The mega Ferrari-Toyota battle at the end of Le Mans, the intra-Porsche battle at Qatar, Alpine-BMW battling in their debut seasons with their LMDh Hypercars... it's been great.
And, because six different cars have won seven races — the #6 Porsche winning two, at Qatar and Fuji, the #7 Toyota winning at Imola in the rain, the #12 JOTA winning at Spa, the #50 Ferrari taking Le Mans, the #8 Toyota dominating at Interlagos, the #83 Ferrari taking an inaugural win at COTA — no one can really say the organisers have decided the results.
Plus, as the year has continued, Alpine and BMW have made huge strides, both their taking first Hypercar podiums at Fuji, and Peugeot has made lots of progress with the new 9X8 as well.
An unnecessary gimmick
The other side of the coin is that Balance of Performance is an unnecessary gimmick, creating artificially close racing with the organisers deciding who wins each race, thus destroying the ‘spirit of endurance racing’.
“It’s so artificial!”
If you derestricted GT3 cars, for example, or WEC’s Hypercars, some would be miles ahead of the others. This, then, shows that some cars are being held back from their true potential, while others are being brought forward, in order to create the close racing TV viewers, fans at the track, sponsors, drivers, and teams want.
A Ford Mustang, for example, or a BMW M4, shouldn’t be competing with a Ferrari 296, Porsche 911, or McLaren 720S. And yet BoP allows them to do this. It’s artificial and takes the excitement out of racing.
Plus, it removes almost any form of in-season development, with cars homologated at the start of the year and, in WEC’s case for Hypercar, Evo jokers allowed to make small modifications and improvements through the year or from one season into next. And, it’s meant the end of race-specific aero kits, when Audi would bring bodywork solely designed for Le Mans and another kit for races which required a different downforce profile.
“The organisers decide who wins”
Because the organisers set the weight, power, and energy levels of the cars for each race, this means that they can decide who wins, or at least who they’d like to see win, at each given race.
For example, to make a championship battle go right down to the wire, they could restrict the car leading the championship and/or give the challengers a leg up. Or help a team competing in its home race, or a special anniversary race.
This has happened before, of course, and at Le Mans, no less. In 2016, Ford returned to Le Mans, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of their famous win in 1966, defeating Ferrari. However, given the huge budgets needed at the time to compete in the spaceship class LMP1, The Blue Oval chose to race in the GTE-Pro class.
In preparation for their return they’d raced in that year’s WEC races as well, at Silverstone and Spa. However, at Le Mans in the practice sessions, they were much, much quicker than the previous races, leading to accusations of sandbagging in order to gain favourable BoP for Le Mans.
After test day, Ford were given a series of weight breaks. They then qualified first and second in qualifying, whereas in qualifying for Silverstone, the opening race, they were two seconds off the pace over one lap, and at Spa, well over half a second.
They were pegged back after qualifying, but this did little to change the result in the race, beating Ferrari.
Whether this was a result of Ford’s gamemanship, the ACO giving the manufacturer an advantage, or a conspiracy between the two, is a matter of debate. But from some angles it does look like the ACO “decided” Ford should win on the 50th anniversary of the famous win.
“It destroys the spirit of endurance racing”
Endurance racing is just that — endurance. If the gaps between the leading car and the second-placed car at Le Mans is 10 laps, so be it.
Cars break down in endurance racing, or have to be driven slower to nurse an issue. If you build a slow car which is reliable even when driven at ten-tenths, and therefore beat the faster cars that have spent time in the garage fixing issues, or who have retired altogether — that’s the spirit of endurance racing.
BoP means that gets eroded because all the cars are so close together performance wise. If you have an issue with your leading car, because the gap may be less than a minute, meaning you’ll lose a lot of positions very quickly, especially if there’s large manufacturer interest because of BoP.
So what's the answer?
In this day and age, where motorsport budgets come mainly from marketing and not R&D as they may have done in the 20th century, unless you're F1 where manufacturers will happily spend hundreds of millions a year to compete, I think the days of BoP-less sportscar racing world has died.
We simply can't have it both ways: we can't have close, exciting racing, but with no BoP. WEC budgets for the year are now in the rough $20 million range for a two-car factory team. That simply isn't enough to develop a car without a strong BoP framework.
Look at F1: the budgets are in the $135 million region a year, and they're developing bespoke racing machines with no BoP framework. On the flipside, the technical regulations in F1 are restrictive, but in a different way to WEC's.
WEC's technical regulations stipulate a car must achieve certain drag and downforce levels. How those levels are generated are, generally, up to you, at least in the LMH ruleset followed by Peugeot, Toyota, and Ferrari, among others. That means we get cars that look completely different, with the old Peugeot 9X8 taking a very different approach to anyone else on how it meets those downforce/drag targets.
That said, I do think WEC needs to stop sharing the BoP tables publicly before every race. It creates discussion of BoP and tends to become the dominant topic at race weekends. (And yes, we at TRL are guilty of this too.)
The teams are banned from talking about BoP to the media — indeed, Toyota were fined for it recently — but this doesn't stop team officials and drivers skirting around the issue.
Phil Oakley
Peugeot said to media at Le Mans that they'll stick around if they're "treated fairly", clearly a thinly-veiled reference to BoP, while Porsche's Fred Makowiecki told this author that the teams were playing politics, clearly another sideswipe at BoP.
But that's for another article (watch this space). Let us know what you think of BoP on social media!
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