Quote:
Originally Posted by henk4
You may also know that ALMS races are normally less than or about three hours, so that is a different concept too. If people find watching proper endurance racing boring, I think the last thing that should be done is creating artificial restarts. A race only starts once....
The drop in in grid numbers post Le Mans will most likely be not so severe when the WEC will start next year, as there will be more to win than just Le Mans.
Anyway, whenever I am attending a race I hate to see the safety car come out, as it means that all the racing that has been done prior to that, was more or less in vain. Every advantage gained during proper racing will be lost, which of course is less of a concern for those who have lost those seconds, but for those who build up a proper lead, any safety car is just quite annoying. But if that's how you feel that racing should be done, I will stop arguing, because we then obviously live on a different planet.
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I've attended the majority of ALMS and LMS races for the last three years - so I'm aware of the different lengths :-)
You can think of it that way - that the advantage is lost. On the other hand you can think of it like this; The team that has the best package and drivers will be able to build that gap each time the safety car restart occurs. If they genuinely have the best package for 6 hours it shouldn't matter whether they're P1 + 50sec or P1 +0.5sec with half an hour (or 2 minutes) to go.
In addition, safety car strategy can allow teams to gain an advantage by short fuelling, etc. And people doing fuel only after half a stint and then pushing their tyres to do 1.5 stints adds to the variables in play. A good example of this was Road America where some cars did a full service after half a stint and other chose not to - the way that played out at the end was really exciting.
Another way of looking at it is that IMSA style safety car usage puts much more emphasis on the whole team.
Ben