Luis Isasi¹, Jose Viyeira-Martínez² and JP Arbáizar-Gómez¹

¹ Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Escuela Politécnica Superior. Área de Ingeniería de Organización. Avenida de la Universidad nº 30, 28911 Leganés (Madrid), Spain.

² Automotiva S. L. Calle Villanueva 28, 28001 Madrid, Spain.

lisasi@ing.uc3m.es

Abstract. In the last decades, the use of Balance of Performance (BoP) as one of the main strategies to match the performances of different vehicles in top level motorsport championships, has nearly become a standard. There are different reasons for this, but one of the most important ones is that in most of the cases, the vehicles are not designed from scratch since they derive from mass production ones, making difficult to balance them without making specific configurations. However, the traditional BoP process was based on extensive on track testing, making it extremely costly in time and money. What is presented in this work is an optimized methodology base on powerful simulation tools, that enables a much more effective management philosophy of those championships run under BoP technical regulations.

Keywords: Balance of Performance (BoP), Business & Economics, Motorsport, Simulation, Analysis.

1. Introduction

At present, top level Motorsport, besides being a sport discipline, it constitutes a profitable business for most of its stakeholders, namely organizers, promoters, teams and sanctioning bodies. As a normal policy, high level Motorsport activities and competitions are organized under what is called “International Series”, that are regulated by the existing sanctioning bodies. Those that manage the most important activity are FIA, through its International Sporting Code [1], and closely related to it, IMSA and Automobile Club de l’Ouest.

The most important championships are normally at international level, and are grouped and regulated under the concept “International Motorsport Series”, among which, the most important ones are those sanctioned by FIA [2], IMSA [3] or Lemans [4]. More than half of all them are technically regulated through what is called “Balance of Performances” (BoP), being one of the most known the issued for GT3 category by FIA GT Committee [5].

The basic idea under this BoP concept is to balance, through the adjustment of different technical characteristics of the different vehicles that are eligible for each championship, the performances level on the different competition tracks, and consequently, their lap times and consequently their competitiveness level.

Once integrated tools like VSM® appeared, complicated analysis have become affordable in a lot of heterogeneous areas like energy optimization, accident avoidance, or trajectory optimization.

2. Research Objectives

When BoP concept started to be applied more than a decade ago, the procedure to fix the different configurations of the vehicles mainly consisted in performing extensive testing sessions on real racing circuits, which was extremely complicated and costly, since it was necessary to specifically move the cars to the tracks, select professional drivers that had to test all the cars, and repeat the process in order to warrant that the fixed configurations were really balanced. Just to have a rough idea, the average cost for a top GT car (including tires, fuel, powertrain revision works, amortization, driver fee, track rental, etc.), is around 590 €/km, so a complete BoP test on three different circuits could mean around 200k€ per tested car.

Considering the above, the main objective of the present work was to evaluate the viability of changing the BoP defining process through simulation, instead of through costly testing sessions.

3. Conclusions

In the present work, an efficient methodology, simulation based, to manage the BoP definition process has been presented. Among the numerous advantages that this approach has, the following ones could be highlighted:

• The need for BoP related specific testing is avoided, resulting in important savings, not only in economic costs, but also in time.
• In case of important modifications of either vehicles (weight, technical evolutions, etc.) or circuits (re-surfacing, racing line modification, etc.), the reevaluation of performance level is quite strait forward.
• When comparing the real results of the presented work, with those obtained in former occasions through real testing, it can be verified that simulation ones allow better conclusions’ normalization, since several important aspects and variables (driver, car set-up quality, momentary track status, etc) are taken out of the process.

4. Acknowledgements

The authors really appreciate the collaboration of both AVL Racing ® and Automotiva ® for their support with, respectively, VSM® and DRIVE® licenses, and data logging systems.

References

1. FIA, “FIA International Sporting Code,” 2021. https://www.fia.com/regulation/category/123 (accessed Feb. 27, 2021).
2. FIA, “FIA International Series,” 2021. https://www.fia.com/events/international-series/season-2021/2021-international-series (accessed Mar. 03, 2021).
3. Imsa, “IMSA Series,” 2021. https://www.imsa.com/discover-series/ (accessed Jan. 14, 2021).
4. Automobile Club de l’Ouest, “Lemans,” 2021. https://www.lemans.org/ (accessed Feb. 16, 2021).
5. FIA, “GT3 Balance of Performance Chart,” 2020. https://www.fia.com/fia-gt-committee (accessed Jan. 15, 2021).