Updated after FIA confirms it is best two of three1. The previous version was based on last two races.
Conor Orr Take Aways
- Relative to the last race the Cadillac and Porsche power/weight is penalized.
- Ferrari, Peugeot, and Aston Martin untouched on base power/weight.
- Lots of top speed adjustments, some compensating other BoP parameters and changes.
- Peugeot loses a lot of top end power.
- Are we seeing some circuit dynamics at play? What parameters work with and against others?
Comments, corrections, and suggestions welcome. At the very least contribute to the proof reading as the editor has gone missing.
Hello Sports Fans!
There are long breaks in some sports. Pro football, of the American kind, doesn’t have any competitive games from February to September. Within an actual season FIA WEC beats other sports with nearly a two month gap between round 5 and round 6. Are there any other series with such a gap? Answers on a postcard to a random PO Box in Derby.
So, in honor [sic2] of sports with breaks that allow us all to reaslise that there are other things in life – trees, books, good food, love – this update is brought to you in the style of the legendary Conor Orr to celebrate the return of the series to the US of A during the opening weekend of the NFL season.
Football is back! WEC is back!
Another parallel; these are two sports that aim to, and have, close competition across all teams.
The new BoP table is out. This is manna from heaven for those that confuse cynicism with intelligence, nitpicking cherry picked bits of data like this is a simple process, especially while ignoring the context. Like NFL there will be moaning that some teams win more than others, and many will prove their worth with accusations of match fixing. That doesn’t mean it aint close, closer than ever.
So, let’s ignore the Tweedledum and Tweedledee approach to “analysing” BoP and see if there is anything (or not!) to learn from the changes, anything to boost our understanding. At the very least lets just see what the changes are.
On any given Sunday…
Recent Performance
If you need reminding here is the performance from the last three rounds:
Round 3, Spa: Ferrari were the pace setters.3
The gap was smaller in the race, with Alpine close. Aston Martin still feels like a new car.
Round 2, Imola: Ferrari wins
BMW and Toyota second and third in both Top 10 and Top 60%, but Ferrari had the overall pace. There is a better consistency between those Top 10 and Top 60% than normally seen.
Power:Weight
So, all pretty close, but the biggest advantage we see is Cadillac Sao Paulo. Followed by Porsche in the same race. Ferrari had a decent advantage over ten laps in Spa, less of one over the longer averages. Alpine followed it in this race.
The adjustments are, as usual, multi dimensional. Some movements are offset by others, others are combined in a direction that could be achieved by a different approach. What to do?
Increase the base power for low speed acceleration? Ah, but then the top end needs reducing to compensate the knock-on effect on top speed – not just what the top speed is, but also that you get there quicker.
So why not do that by reducing the weight. Ah, but then the cornering dynamics change.
And vice versa. And what about tyre degradation, or energy usage. And. And. What to do? We could just say they got it wrong. It gives you the nice warm superiority glow that satisfies the ignorant mind, but that is too easy.
As we’ve seen time and time before, and is often ignored, it is multiple dimensional. Joyously so.
Nevertheless, let’s try by starting with two of the dimensions combined, in the joyous unit of watt per gram.
All movements are down for Power:Weight. I don’t recall that happening before. This negative is the same for power, if we isolate that, but not for weight. Is this something about COTA, relative to Interlagos and Spa?
Comparison to best two of last three races
This is the updated bot. The chart below compares average of the best two performances for each car to the relative movement in BoP for power/weight from those same races to the latest BoP for COTA4.
It is noteworthy that the author found a better correlation between the BoP changes and the two best of the last three than the best of two that was used reportedly used in Sau Paulo. There is an even better correlation with the last three. This is not to suggest that it isn’t the two of three approach that is used. It is more likely to be a difference in the simple approach here of just taking the Top 10 and Top 60%, compared to an approach that looks at more detail to the race and considers cautions, disqualified laps, etc…
The premise of this approach is to remove some of the accusations of fixing from the Tweedledees by letting the performance drive the result rather than purely trying to balance, or as before get them in the ballpark. It is driven by race performance. A sensible approach would be to tweak the number of races averaged to see which works best and goes down best with the teams (none will). Potentially a longer average, but quite like the avoiding an outlier is a good approach.
What to adjust?
On top of this, it is always worth remembering that this is a combination of two parameters. Depending on track, or which specific part of performance is being corrected for, it could be weighted more to weight, power, or high speed power. As shown below, there is some compensation the P/W adjustments with high speed power.
Being on the line means, superficially, you are getting the right adjustment in this population. Toyota and Aston Martin is the slowest and benefit. Toyota, BMW, Alline are close to the line.
Porsche and Ferrari are below the line so have a slightly more negative adjustment compared to their performance.
Cadillac, while losing some of its advantage to Sau Paulo, looks to have benefited here. However, it is pretty extreme car in this rule set, often behaving differently with the weight-low speed-high speed and it seems to have a more varied single lap to stint pace difference. As seen in IMSA and FIA WEC. Could it be this playing into the calculation? It is closer to the line when more races are used.
Peugeot benefits – and it needs it!
But let’s hold these thoughts while we look at high speed power and how it plays out for last two races performance v. BoP change.
Weight
Here we see Cadillac and Porsche’s big movements. Both taking two steps backwards from Le Mans – two medium steps for Porsche, a small step and giant leap for Cadillac.
BMW, the only winner with weight still loses out in overall power/weight.
Power <250kph
There is an even spread here. The Hypercars at either end (Aston and Peugeot) needing all the help they can get, but the Ferrari and Toyota with inherently good cars not needing it – and are well under the 500kW.
It is interesting to see that in combining these two platform types the average power is very similar across both. The variation is more for Hypercar, which can probably be attributed to the greater degree of variety that class allows.
As commented on before, only reductions in base power for COTA.
Power >250kph
We really see the compensation at work here:
Toyota, 484kW base power (it’s a good car) and +7.4% >250 kph adjustment! Peugeot, 520kW and -7.3% (it’s crap, but slippery).
Hurrah! It allows variety.
Three groups have been established. The French with low power. Aston and Toyota with most. The rest in a close bunch in the middle.
Comparison to previous three races
There would be a better correlation with the best of the last two. However the two outliers, Aston Martin and Peugeot, don’t help here. Peugeot sees a compensation factor in High Speed v. the benefit it got in P/W v. last two races. Multi-dimensional.
Aston Martin does better than the simple model suggests.
Ferrari and Porsche a little better on top speed and these two did a little worse on P/W.
Cadillac is an outlier on both the P/W correlation chart and the high speed power chart. Cadillac does better than the simple model for P/W, worse for top end power. It is multi-dimensional, Seb, multi-dimensional.
Long Term Tables/Charts
For reference here are the BoP tables for power and weight going back to the beginning of time.
Replenishment Rate
FIA WEC don’t publish this, but have the same as IMSA. Have you not worked this out yet, it’s basic maths.
- Sportscar365 Friday Notebook ↩︎
- The approach at equipe43 is to have English English for WEC and American English for IMSA. This is probably nearly always adhered to. However, Conor is American so he is honored. ↩︎
- Le Mans not included in this version of BoP. ↩︎
- An introduction to how this calculation works. Note this was written before the two of three consideration was introduced. ↩︎