Quote:
Originally Posted by henk4
the purpose of a safety period and a safety car is to maintain safety, not to make the race more exciting.
If Americans need safety periods because the races are not exciting enough, they should not watch endurance racing. I did not see Imola, (coincided with the Goodwood Festival of Speed), so I cannot say whether it was boring or not. Peugeot won, so that might be boring by definition for some 
I did see PLM (a streamed version) and I found the safety car periods extremely annoying. So please do not impose the IMSA rules upon us. If we need "exciting" races make them 20 laps, but not 10 hours.
I find the safety car periods dishonest towards the cars that managed to get a time advantage by proper racing, by being better/faster or what ever, and see that advantage subsequently being reduced to zero, because of some non-descript incident that brought out the safety car. Therefore in the interest of honest racing, safety cars should be kept at bay as much as possible. |
I agree with all of this.
I was at Petit Le Mans live and there were a lot of spins that did not involve Full Course Cautions. There was literally a prototype that spun on the front stretch, sat there for 2 laps, got going again and there was no caution. There were also a lot of spins in the esses where the guys got going again with no safety cars.
But all of these safety cars were legitimate in the sense that there were cars stopped on the track, not because of some phantom debris cautions to bunch the field up like NASCAR.
If you want to get of US Safety Cars you have to do two things:
1. Give LMP1s more horsepower so they don't have to divebomb the lap traffic in the turns to keep their momentum up.
2. Make IMSA rules like the Le Mans 24 Hours rules where you have to get your car back to the pits yourself or your car is done. There were lots of instances at Petit where drivers couldn't make it back to the pits so instead of pulling off somewhere safe, they just would park by the track and get towed back to the pits. In fact, the Patron car said on the radio when he parked at turn 6/7 "this should be a good spot to bring out a safety car".