It?s all anyone could really talk about in the paddock at Le Mans. On Friday, as teams were doing last-minute checkouts and tweaking before the Saturday, 3:00 p.m. local time start of the 84th running of the 24-hour classic, competitors in the closely watched and hotly contested GTE class were waiting for a final ruling from the organizers on the all-important BoP calculations, or balance of performance.
Ideally, BoP uses exhaustive performance data from previous races and track sessions to selectively add weight or diminish power from some cars to create closer competition in highly varied classes such as GTE, the fastest of Le Mans?s two production-based groupings where Porsche 911s and Ferrari 488s compete against Corvettes and Ford GTs. In reality, BoP manipulation is a black art practiced by the French (as well as other sports-car sanctioning bodies at different races) to their own peculiar rules. Last week?s pre-race testing sessions at Le Mans saw the Corvette C7.R dominate the lap times, but a BoP change implemented after that severely handicapped the Corvette and Porsche teams, they say, and produced disastrous qualifying times for them in the final pre-race session on Thursday. The Corvettes were more than 4.6 seconds off the pace, with the 911s far back as well, while both the new Ford GT and the Ferrari 488 got instantly quicker. Insinuations immediately flooded the Le Mans paddock that the French were manipulating the BoP formulas to re-create the classic Fe...