twice around the clock

Spectacular sunrises and a sense of optimism starts the 2020 racing season

IMSA and Le Mans are converging, and everyone still hates Balance of Performance.

Jonathan M. Gitlin – Jan 30, 2020 2:02 pm | 16

You're only allowed four mechanics over the pit wall during a stop. Credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

What a difference a year makes. In 2019, the Rolex 24 at Daytona could have more accurately been called the Rolex 14 because it rained so hard and for so long that there were 10 hours of red flag stoppages and safety car periods. The sports car community had a markedly better time of it in 2020—the last raindrops fell sometime on Thursday, well before the green flag waved at 1:40pm on Saturday, with summer-like temperatures during the day that were welcomed by everyone who descended on Daytona Beach in Florida from places where winter remains in full effect. The racing was quite different from a year ago as well. It was less of a barnstormer, for one thing, with a noticeably smaller grid than in years past, and minus the international star power that is Fernando Alonso—the former F1 double-champ decided to start his racing year by competing in the Dakar rally, instead. That’s not to suggest a bad time was had—far from it.

Who wants to race to France?

The biggest news for the weekend actually happened before the race got underway. As mentioned in my pre-race article, talks have been ongoing between IMSA—which runs the WeatherTech Sportscar Championship (of which the Rolex 24 is a part) and the ACO, the French organization that controls the 24 Hours of Le Mans. On Friday, the two groups held a press conference to announce that the next iteration of the DPi prototype race cars—due in 2022—will now be called LMDh (for Le Mans Daytona hybrid) and will compete against the ACO’s new Le Mans Hypercar at the world’s biggest race. (Sorry Indy, the 500 is still only the world’s largest single day sporting event.)

LMDh will use a homologated carbon fiber chassis from the same four manufacturers that produce the current DPi carbon fiber tubs. OEMs will still be free to use their own engines and electronics, and the cars will have much more road car-like styling, similar to Le Mans Hypercars. There will be a common hybrid system that recovers and deploys kinetic energy at the rear wheels, although beyond that, the technical details remain a work in progress. The upshot of this news is that the factory-supported prototypes fielded by the likes of Cadillac, Acura, and Mazda will be eligible to compete at Le Mans for an overall win, something that many sports car fans have been wanting to see since the dieselgate-powered implosion of the mighty LMP1-H category.

As for the OEMs, they’re happy but cautious. “It’s great that it’s happening. There are more challenges, more interesting dynamics,” said Jon Ikeda, Acura Division’s general manager. “We’ve got to look at it from a company perspective and see what it all means—you know, we’re a North American brand, but at the same time it’s a global stage. And it’s interesting to see how our company feels toward it. It’s exciting,” Ikeda told me.

Nelson Cosgrove, director of Mazda Motorsports, had a similar take. “It’s super exciting for sports car racing and gives the sport a wonderful runway going into the next ten years to race globally. It has been a very long time since someone could take a prototype and run both here and at Le Mans, and the level of interest in this announcement from the industry is really incredible. For us, we will have to wait to see exactly what the rules are and how all that plays out, but certainly we’ll take a strong look once we know… And now, since we have a definite close-out to the DPi 1.0 era, we have to try to close that out with winning some of these big races and fighting for the championship,” he told Ars.

“Since the introduction of the Cadillac DPi-V.R in 2017, we have had tremendous success in North America in the IMSA Series and are encouraged at the prospect of an international formula for the future of prototype racing. Once we obtain further details, we will evaluate if our participation aligns with our company’s future vision,” said Cadillac Racing Director Mark Kent in a statement sent to Ars.

Beyond the problem of North American brands not really having a compelling marketing mandate to race in France (other than Corvette, but that’s different), there are still a few significant details that need to be worked out in the next two years. The ACO Hypercar spec calls for race cars with around 800hp (600kW), whereas the current DPi prototypes are at or below 600hp (447kW), depending upon the current balance of performance. If IMSA does indeed go for an off-the-shelf hybrid system like the one being adopted by the British Touring Car Championship, the teams are still going to need to turn up their engines by another 150hp (112kW) or so, and I’m not sure that any of the three current OEMs have that kind of margin with their current engines, particularly if the idea is to be able to race for 24 hours.

Two men wearing blue Acura team shirts — “We won the Michelin Green-X challenge more than any other manufacturer when it was running,” said Steve Erikson, vice president and COO of Honda Performance Development (left). To his right is Ted Klaus, president of HPD. Credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

Less carbon, more racing

Friday also saw a press conference with IMSA boss John Doonan and Assistant Secretary of the Department of Energy Daniel Simmons, who gave us some more info about IMSA’s efforts to reduce the series’ carbon impact. I asked Doonan where he thought the lowest-hanging fruit was in terms of making a dent in the problem.

“We have a program through all our logistics with SmartWay, looking at the transporters that are bringing all the equipment here and finding ways through aerodynamic devices [to make them more efficient]. Obviously, we’re trying to find alternative fuels as well to make that aspect of going from city to city—you know, we have 12 different events throughout the year for the WeatherTech championship—to make sure that we’re doing our part in between events. Once the race cars are on track, we’ve got partners like Michelin and VP, which continue to work with us on being one step ahead of those protocols. For me, it’s a whole wheel and bunch of different spokes of it, from fuel to tires to logistics, and I would suggest SmartWay is an example of that,” Doonan told me.

It sounds like reducing the number of tires used on track during a race weekend is also in the cards. “We’re making sure that we work with Michelin on tire allotments to try to bring those down, which is also a cost factor as well as a green factor,” Doonan said.

The teams get into the spirit, too. “I love the fact that racing for us between IMSA and IndyCar in over 30 events a year, we can keep track of our carbon footprint—not just the cars, but all the people traveling, the transporters, and so on. So we truly have an ecosystem analysis of our footprint as HPD,” said Ted Klaus, president of Honda Performance Development.

“Yes, it’s small, but if we can pilot or incubate ideas here at these events, why wouldn’t we? And I think it’s an untapped potential for all racing series. I’m really pleased with IMSA’s leadership, and quite frankly we’ve been right there with them for decades. And it relates to our 2030 vision—we have a hard 50 percent reduction in our carbon footprint by then. I’m not sitting here today to say we can go carbon negative, but you know we can reduce our carbon footprint by 50 percent or more and plan to do so,” Klaus told me.

Balance of Performance—three words (almost) everyone loves to hate

Balance of Performance—everyone just says BoP—is a pretty hot topic right now. Instead of simply writing a technical rulebook teams use to build their cars, IMSA (and other series) use BoP to prevent one team or make of car from running away with an enormous advantage. It upsets the purists, but there’s no denying that it helps keep the racing close. It also upsets all the teams, at least the ones who feel they’re being penalized for being good at what they do. In the days before the Rolex 24, there were plenty of BoP adjustments handed out in the DPi class, as well as in the two production-based categories, GTLM and GTD.

Over at Racer, Marshall Pruett dug into the specifics. In DPi, the Acura ARX-05 was hardest hit, with a reduction in turbo boost above 6,000rpm, and the Cadillacs gained the most via a 22lb (10kg) weight break. In GTLM, the new Corvette C8.R got a bigger air restrictor (increasing engine power), the Porsche 911 RSRs got an extra 22lbs (10kg) of ballast, and the Petit Le Mans-winning Ferrari 488 GTE was hit particularly hard, with a boost reduction from 2,000rpm to the red line, plus a change to its rear wing angle of attack that increased downforce—not what you want on a track with so many high-speed sections. In GTD, there were similar boost reductions for the Ferrari 488 GT3 and the BMW M6 GT3, as well as the Acura NSX GT3s, which also gained a hefty 55lbs (25kg) of extra weight.

Talking to teams and drivers in the paddock, this ruined a fair few people’s races before they turned a wheel.

Did you actually watch any racing?

As most sports car fans know, being at the track is often the worst place to be if you actually want to follow what’s going on. You can instead soak up the atmosphere, bask in the sunshine, and get pretty hungry once all the infield campers break out their grills, which is probably fair compensation for looking clueless when someone asks you who’s in the lead.

The field was far smaller than in years gone past, with just 38 cars taking the green flag on Saturday. The #77 Mazda DPi was fastest in qualifying and pulled a gap on the rest of the field for the first few laps, but most of the DPi class managed to stay on the same lap for the first few hours. The #7 Team Penske Acura got sidelined early on after coming together with the #55 Mazda, crushing one of its radiators and some engine plumbing that took 35 minutes to fix. That effectively took both cars out of contention for a win, as the Mazda was penalized with a drive-through penalty for causing a collision.

The race at the front came to the Cadillacs, with the #10 Wayne Taylor Racing car leading at hour six and the #5 Mustang Sampling Racing/JDC-Miller Motorsports car leading at hour 12. Good weather and a smaller grid of cars probably contributed to the long stretches of green flag racing—when a full course caution was enacted around 8am on Sunday morning, it ended the longest continuous green flag stretch in Rolex 24 history—274 laps, or 7 hours and 37 minutes. That was pretty amazing, but not as amazing as that morning’s sunrise, which really was magnificent, as this time-lapse (shot by Chris Naughton) proves:

With 18 hours run, the #10 Cadillac was back in front, with only the #5 Cadillac and #77 Mazda on the same lap. The next six hours weren’t quite plain sailing, but the team overcame a 60-second stop-and-hold penalty for running a red light at the end of the pit lane during hour 19 to end the race in first position, having completed 833 laps in 24 hours and 33.494 seconds. Mazda took second overall with the #77 car, and Cadillac also scored third with the #5, both of which also finished 833 laps. The fastest Acura was the #6, which ended the race five laps down.

In the pro-am LMP2 category it was the #81 DragonSpeed team that took the win, finishing just behind the damaged #7 Team Penske Acura. In GTLM, it was a second win in two years for BMW Team RLL and the M8 GTE, which probably makes up for all those “big M8” memes and jokes. Porsche took second and third in class with its new 911 RSR-19, and Corvette Racing scored a respectable fourth place with the debut of the mid-engined C8.R. In GTD, the win went to the #48 Paul Miller Racing Lamborghini.

The winners got shiny new Rolex Daytona and a trophy. Everyone else got the knowledge that there’s another chance for glory in a few short weeks, a couple of hours down the road in Sebring.

Jonathan M. Gitlin Automotive Editor

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

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