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