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Let’s start with the ideal. We don’t have cautions and the race pans out with no influence from them. That would be great.
What about safety?
And back in the day we had something closer to the “ideal”, but how? Broken cars would be left by the side of tracks. Marshals would clear up on a hot track with, at best, maybe a local yellow. etc…
I really don’t want that. And here is our first choice. What approach do we take to safety?
Of all the options we’ve gone relatively conservative here. Note I don’t say too conservative, just of the all the choices from full risk to no risk we are on the conservative side. I certainly would not disagree with that approach to safety. The compromise here does not involve VSC (or similar) for IMSA. There will be knock ons to insurance and viability of the future of the series.
Then we have fairness.
How do we treat the pit stops and the wave rounds?
To try and minimise the impact of luckily stopping at the right time, or the chaos of diving in to the pits (another safety consideration), the pits are closed and then opened for each kind of car. I can’t think of a better way. It will still favor some over others, but this reduces the impact and likelihood of that.
Then there is the wave-round. You have a choice to let the procedure, like at Le Mans, cause a big gap in positions, suddenly making it a full lap difference (or 1/3 lap at Le Mans) depending where the leaders are and the timing of the caution. Or you wave round and people can gain chunks of time.
Which is fairer? Here the choice is to minimise the chance of losing out rather than minimising the chance of gain? Would it be fairer the other way round, well that is just a point of view.
I wouldn’t have wave rounds, but when I think about it my reasoning is no better than the opposite. I’d like to try and maintain gaps people had built up, but it isn’t great at that. It would at least leave cars between you and the leader and mean you still have to overtake. As everyone will probably stop this mixes this up anyway and my argument isn’t as good. It would remove some time faffing around behind the car and mean we get back to green quicker, which would be nice. But thinking about the whole of getting everyone bunched up, pits closed and opening, it isn’t that important.
I have my views on which is fairer, but it isn’t simple. Neither approach is by any means perfect.
What about the show?
Is it for the show that this is chosen? I don’t know. There are reasons to have this situation anyway. A few years ago I would say that there was more influence of the show (I’d love to see some stats on number and length of caution periods over the years). I feel that has eased in the current mini-era in which we are in.
I’m not going to claim that they is none of this, but the driving forces behind why IMSA has the approach above is, in my view, clearly more of the other reasons above. I was say their priorities are safety, fairness, and then show.
Conclusion
IMSA have chosen a level of safety. Inherently this introduces a compromise with how the race is run and the impact on the sporting fairness. To solve this you can go one of two ways, a solution that is more likely to unfairly penalise a competitor, or one that is unfairly benefit a competitor. They’ve gone with later. And finally, we know this effects the “show”, but that impact is less than it was.
And one final point. You don’t often get a winner that doesn’t deserve it. Or, at least, not for the reasons above. We already have a lot of randomness in Motorsport; weather, punctures, illness, caught up in someone else’s accident, etc… You adapt and play the cards that are dealt.
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