Are the tentacles of the WEC BoP dumbing down the racing?

No Balance of Performance, no golden age of sportscar racing. Period. Like it or not, the BoP is one of the building blocks of the success of top-flight prototype racing around the world.

You can’t criticise its place at the highest levels of endurance motorsport for that reason, but perhaps in the case of the World Endurance Championship, right now you can question its widening scope. 

In the WEC circa 2025, the tentacles of the BoP are creeping ever wider. That was confirmed by the rule makers, the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest in Qatar for the series opener last month. They told us that in the Hypercar class a car’s ability to make its tyres last over a stint or a double is now being factored into the BoP calculations. 

You might think, so what? Managing tyre degradation is part of the competition and so should be part of the BoP. Only it wasn’t previously. Not really. And arguably it shouldn’t be now if you take the rulemakers at their word. 

They have repeatedly told us what the BoP doesn’t do – and they reiterated this in Qatar – is “compensate for the lack of optimisation in racing (strategy choices, driver form, tyre choices)”. Their brackets, not mine, I hasten to add. 

My argument is that when it comes to “optimisation in (endurance) racing” – my brackets this time — there isn’t a criterion much higher up the list than looking after a set of tyres. So that’s maintaining performance over a stint, a double or, at the Le Mans 24 Hours, a triple.  

It was revealed that as of 2025, the BoP calculations for regular WEC events are now being made using an algorithm based on a manufacturer’s 10 fastest laps and the quickest 60% of laps over the course of a race. That’s a significant increase from last year when just the fastest 20% of laps were taken into account. 

That didn’t mean that tyre deg was totally factored out of the equation in the past. The pace of the car type over its quickest laps will, most likely, be set when it is on a fresh rubber. That early speed will almost inevitably have an effect on performance when the tyres are a stint and a half old. 

But the shift for this season can be regarded as a sea-change. It has removed, or gone a long way to removing, one of the big differentiators in a formula where the cars are already closely matched, given the strict constraints on their design, even before the BoP kicks in. Is this a further dumbing down of our branch of the sport?

Fuel mileage is no longer a big factor in endurance racing. And by that I mean one of those differentiators that can decide who wins and who doesn’t. The strict controls on engine performance that pretty much dictate how many laps a car can do between pitstops on a tankful of fuel — or rather its energy allocation — are one of the key tenets of the rules. 

These latest developments inevitably lead me to reach for my rose-tinted spectacles and hark back to one of the greatest editions of Le Mans of all time. In 2011, the Audi and Peugeot turbo diesels went head to head with all guns blazing. The Audi R18 TDi could do four stints on a set of Michelin tyres, the second-generation Peugeot 908, the V8-powered car, only three. But it could go a lap longer on the fuel. It made for an engaging and then thrilling contest in which the German manufacturer came out on top by a scant 13s. 

What needs to be pointed out is that the latest move is the will of the manufacturers competing in Hypercar. From last year’s Bahrain WEC finale in November up to Qatar, there were eight technical working groups hosted by rule makers the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest and attended by each of the manufacturers to fine tune the BoP system. ACO competitions director Thierry Bouvet revealed in Qatar that various options were laid out on the table, and Hypercar’s constituents voted in favour of a more all-pervading system.

Marcel Fassler/Andre Lotterer/Benoit Treluyer Audi leads Sebastien Bordais/Simon Pagenaud/Pedro Lamy, Peugeot

Photo by: Jeff Bloxham / Motorsport Images

A quick straw poll by Autosport in Qatar found only manufacturers in favour. Or rather no one is willing to come out against the latest move. Porsche, BMW and Peugeot all stuck their hands up and said it was the correct move. That’s significant because the first two are LMDh manufacturers, the last-named a marque with a Le Mans Hypercar.

Toyota, the master of tyre management with its LMH, chose not to offer an opinion. Draw your own conclusions on how it cast its vote. 

At the back end of 2023 as the FIA and the ACO were working on a new system of BoP to replace the one that clearly didn’t work in what we should regard as a year one of our golden age, an interesting term was thrown into the pot. The BoP, said FIA Endurance Commission president Richard Mille, should not be “a pillow of laziness”. 

I understand where he was coming from, but I am not going to say that the manufacturers voted 12 months on for an easy life. That’s because there’s an elephant in the room — the fact that Hypercar is made up of cars built to two different sets of regulations, LMH and LMDH. 

It was this, said Bouvet, that drove the push “to take more laps to remove the small differences that were still existing”. FIA technical engineering director Thomas Chevaucher pointed out the “differences between LMH and LMDh in some of the components that can have an effect on tyre degradation”. He didn’t mention it, but he was alluding to the fact that LMH hybrids are four-wheel-drive and LMDh machinery rear-drive only. 

The chance now as the governance and the manufacturers start working on a new set of rules for 2030 is to rid Hypercar of what could be regarded as a curse. And there seems to be a will to do it. Ferdinando Cannizzo, technical director of sportscar racing at Ferrari, put it quite simply: “The target should be to have a common platform to ensure a balanced field.” 

#51 Ferrari AF Corse Ferrari 499P: Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado, Antonio Giovinazzi

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Porsche Motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach was equally emphatic: “The most important thing is that we get rid of those two different sets of rules.”

Manufacturers have different needs, of course. Ferrari was always insistent that it would only join the Hypercar ranks if it could build its own chassis — a Ferrari has to be bespoke rather than produced around an off-the-shelf spine supplied by one of the four licensed constructors in LMDh. Some manufacturers will want to spend less money and go the LMDh route, though it is unclear how much cheaper it really is (the LMDh manufacturers all admit that they have spent more than they envisaged).

But does it matter if a Ferrari is built around a Ferrari chassis and an Alpine around an ORECA? Not with the concept of performance windows that so closely-control what a manufacturer can do. Surely, the key point is that cars racing in Hypercar, and in GTP over in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, should all be either rear-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive.

I’m not saying we could get rid of the BoP: we probably have to accept that it is a necessary evil. But I reckon there is a chance that we can start pulling back on its scope. This is motor racing, after all.