WEC Outlines Revised Hypercar BoP Process

FIA World Endurance Championship organizers have outlined a revised Balance of Performance system for the Hypercar class that will involve track adaptation, in a shift from the approach used last year.

On Thursday, the FIA and the ACO revealed details of their plans to keep the nine different models racing in the top class of the WEC this year close in performance, involving a combination of data from last year, simulation data and data derived from each race.

ACO competition director Thierry Bouvet confirmed that the BoP values as listed in the WEC Committee bulletin issued ahead of the Qatar 1812km – including power, weight and maximum stint energy – will be evaluated after every event unlike last year, when the values were established for multiple races at a time in a bid to disincentivize sandbagging.

Average fuel load per stint has also been added as a new parameter to define a car’s theoretical performance.

While any changes to the BoP will also take into account the different characteristics of each circuit visited by the championship, the primary purpose is to keep the cars within a certain margin of the average speed of the fastest example of each car on the grid.

Changes will be made to keep each car inside this undisclosed window, in line with the principles outlined by the FIA and ACO at the end of 2023 of trying to put all manufacturers in range of each other without guaranteeing total performance parity. 

“We are looking at the performance of the best car of every manufacturer, then we do an average of that,” Bouvet told reporters. “Let’s say you’ve got five cars. We take the best car per manufacturer and then do the average of those five cars.

“We define the performance window. Hopefully there will be cars inside. There could be cars that are slower or cars that could eventually be faster.

“Before it was an input-[based] performance window. Now it’s more [based on] results, what we see on track. It’s linked to simulation and the need to correlate.

“It doesn’t mean that we will intervene between each event. The BoP can be identical but you will see different figures, because it’s a different track.

“Last year, we managed to group some of the tracks at the beginning of last year, which we did not at the end of the year. But this year it’s clear it’s going to be per track.”

However, to help prevent sandbagging, Bouvet explained that BoP changes will be made more slowly for cars that are slower than average – meaning a struggling manufacturer cannot expect favorable changes to be made immediately.

He also clarified that an entirely separate BoP will be used for the 24 Hours of Le Mans to stop manufacturers from trying to gain an advantage for the WEC’s blue riband in the opening three rounds of the season at Qatar, Spa and Imola.

“Le Mans is to be separated, so they [manufacturers] can do what they want before,” said Bouvet. “We’ve got the experience of Le Mans last year. 

“It needs to be treated as a separate [BoP]. It needs to be looked in a different way.”

New nomenclature for the system was revealed as part of the new system, with the Starting BoP – essentially the values given to a new model without any real-world race data – now known as the ‘Homologation Parameters’ and the Platform BoP, a system aimed at balancing LMH and LMDh cars, now changed to ‘Equivalence of Platforms.’

The FIA and ACO specifically stated that one of its goals with the revised system is to ensure that the fastest LMH car and the fastest LMDh cars have similar performance.

In addition, changes aimed at altering the competitiveness of a specific car in either sub-class will now be referred to as ‘Manufacturer Compensation.’