Safety Cars and Track Limits

Last week I managed to get around to posting my first article of the year and here I am, already posting my second! I am making an effort to catch up – not that anyone really relies on my blog, but please indulge me anyway.

My last post was a bit of a ramble and I want to make this a bit more targeted. Firstly, Safety Cars. A new procedure was introduced this year at Le Mans to handle Safety Car interventions. Briefly, the procedure involved sending out three Safety Cars (as normal) onto the track initially, to neutralise the field as quickly as possible. They would continue to circulate, and the pit lane entry would remain open, for as long as it took to clear the incident. The pit lane exit would be closed, until the end of the line of cars following a Safety Car went past.

So far, no change from the way it has worked in previous years. However, once the incident that caused the Safety Car had been cleared, a new process was introduced, with the aim of getting the cars lined up behind the leader of each class, with each class in a separate group. This consisted of three stages: one, the ‘merge’ – removing two Safety Cars and leaving the field backed up behind the remaining one; two, the ‘wave-by’, where every car whose class leader is behind it is allowed to pass the Safety Car and catch up with the tail of the field; and three, the ‘drop back’, where first the LMP2 cars, and then the GTE-Am cars fell to the back of the line of cars.

If it takes a while to explain, it takes even longer to execute, and relies on everyone knowing what they’re doing. Personally, I thought it was a recipe for confusion and chaos; but in practice it worked pretty well. The objective was achieved and all the cars lined up in their right class positions. The main issue was the time it took to happen. Although we had three Safety Car interludes, the first one came directly after the start of the race, so the cars were just about in class order anyway. Even then, it took an additional 14m 25s between the incident being declared ‘cleared’ and the green flag being waved. The following two uses of the Safety Car took, respectively, 34m 10s and 23m 56s. That’s a total of 1h 12m 31s of potential racing time lost, while cars were ‘faffing around’ getting themselves sorted into the right order, quite aside from the actual job of getting the incident cleared. If we would have had four classes, as in previous years, it would have taken even longer.

Apart from the time taken though, is the philosophical question of whether closing the field up behind the leader is the ‘right’ thing to do. I must admit I tend to count myself among the many hoping, as Richard Williams put it in this month’s Motor Sport magazine, “never… to see the integrity of a historic race threatened by practices borrowed from Daytona and Sebring”. The trouble is that without these practices, the field may get artificially spread out, and in these days of artificial performance-balanced racing, it is tough to come back if you do find yourself half-a-lap down.

The Spa 24 hours uses a ‘Full Course Yellow’ procedure, followed by a Safety Car, achieving the same end in a different way. The difference in SRO racing is that although it is multi-class, the classes are based on the crew composition, not the car performance, so no account is taken of the classes when sorting out the order of the cars behind the leader. So then it is pot luck whether you have your ‘ace’ driver in the car at the time of the appearance of the Safety Car or not.

I have just returned from Estoril, where Creventic were running one of their 24H Series races – a 12-hour encounter which had a 6-hour Qualification Race beforehand. Creventic do not use a Safety Car at all, but neutralise the field using ‘Code-60’ when necessary. This is a slower version of SRO’s Full Course Yellow, (operating at 60km/h rather than 80km/h) but it is restarted directly with a green flag, leaving the cars where they are, theoretically at least, when the signal to restart is given. Interestingly, this also leads to accusations of unfairness, as an awful lot can depend on the timing of the Code-60; how much fuel you have aboard, how close you are to the pit entry and whether there is a fuel pump available. Inevitably, the organisers are looking at ways of improving the process.

I mentioned Howden Haynes in my last post, and I’ll mention him again now. His objective was always to set the car up to be at its optimum at the end of the race, not at the start. It’s an especially sensible policy if you’ve got a Safety Car rule which bunches up the field.

It's not really fair to compare the Spa and Le Mans 24 hour races, but just because I can, here are some statistics. I include the Creventic race at Estoril for interest:
- Le Mans had 24 changes of lead among 8 different cars, representing five different brands;
- Spa had 68 changes of lead among 19 different cars, representing seven different brands;
- Estoril had 4 changes of lead among 4 different cars, representing three different brands (in a 12-hour race).

In addition
- Le Mans had 3 Safety Car periods, and 5 Full Course Yellows accounting for 3h 37m
- Spa had 9 Safety Car periods and 8 Full Course Yellows accounting for 4h 47m
- Estoril had 6 Code-60 periods accounting for 31m (in a 12-hour race)

Track Limits are becoming a bit of a theme, not just in Formula 1, but also at Le Mans as well as at Spa. At Spa, more than 2500 race control messages related to track limit offences.

At Le Mans, 801 messages from race control warned of track limit offences.

At Estoril, drivers were told in their briefing that the blue and white kerbs formed part of the track, and that, provided they did not stray beyond that limit with all four wheels, then they would not be penalised. It was fully appreciated that this was a more lenient approach, but the Race Control staff realised that spending too much time assessing Track Limit offences would possibly lead them to overlooking other, more serious safety issues. Hence their approach and there were only 23 warnings given and six 10-second penalties issued for track limit violations – and one of those was later cancelled.

These kinds of comparisons are futile, of course, and irrelevant for a number of reasons, not least because of the amateur nature of the entrants in Creventic races compared with the professionalism of Le Mans. But they may give some cause for consideration somewhere.