The Balance of Performance is the bone of contention in modern motorsport – Peugeot hopes discussions will stay out of the public eye ahead of WEC debut
It’s hard to imagine modern motorsport without it: the Balance of Performance. It ensures that all teams and vehicles can operate on an equal footing. However, it is also one of the main reasons why politics is played behind the scenes by those involved.
And that’s where the BoP discussions should stay, that the conversations that take place behind the scenes before the events don’t spill over into the race. The race has to remain the race, that’s very important for us.”
“That means we keep those discussions to a minimum during the race. We will try to stick to that.” This statement is particularly interesting as Peugeot’s debut in the World Endurance Championship WEC with the Hypercar 9X8 approaches. The 6h of Monza will take place there this weekend.
Peugeot will then face the LMH cars from Toyota and Glickenhaus, as well as Alpine’s grandfathered Oreca LMP1 in the new top class of endurance racing. It is to be expected that the BoP classification does not yet sit optimally at the first appearance of a new race car. It is therefore all the more important that all parties involved create transparency.
Public tug-of-war does not give the right picture
After the races, “inevitably you’re going to have disagreements”, Jansonnie posits. “We’ve had them before and we’ll have them again. But we will still try to talk to each other so that the show we put on around the world remains sport. It has to remain sport. “
Also to preserve the reputation of all involved, “If we start having a public tug-of-war between the different manufacturers, it doesn’t convey the image of our sport that we want to convey and that we are working for today.”
Indeed, there is a negative example that should be forewarning enough. At the Nürburgring, for example, it was Mercedes-AMG at the 2016 24h race that received a favourable BoP rating through sandbagging. The competition was then powerless in the race. And in the WEC, the zenith of the GTE-Pro class with six factories was not long ago.
WEC forewarned by GTE-Pro time with six factories
A similar problem to 2018/2019 comes to the ACO in the following years. Apart from the hypercar manufacturers, Acura, Alpine, BMW, Cadillac, Lamborghini and Porsche will also enter with cars under LMDh regulations
Porsche’s motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach already pointed out last autumn how difficult the BoP issue was already with two GTE-Pro manufacturers. Jansonnie therefore describes the BoP as “a key issue that rightly worries everyone because we have very different cars that will be competing with each other.”
“We believe that this diversity is what makes the sport so rich and interesting. We can’t at the same time want to take away the diversity and not assume that we have to find a way to make these cars race against each other,” Peugeot’s technical director continued.
Indeed, there is a lot of diversity in the hypercar field, especially on the engine side. Peugeot, for example, relies on a 2.6-litre twin-turbo V6 in the 9X8. The Glickenhaus 007 LMH, on the other hand, has a 3.5-litre V8 twin-turbo and the BMW a 4.0-litre V8 turbo. But: All manufacturers have in common that they use turbo units and the prescribed hybrid system.
