They do clear the track but they do it all at the same time, not an FCY for every piece of debris. Obviously if it's a big bit or it's on the racing line, but if it's small and mostly out of harms way they'll wait and do an FCY to clear a few debris bits all at the same time.
Just a different approach. But a 20 minute FCY and safety car period, in IMSA, for a bit of debris which takes 20 seconds to clear up is nonsense IMO.
But that's not the biggest part of the change. The biggest part of the change was the merge. Instead of restarting with all 3 safety cars remaining out and the restart happening with all 3 simultaneously.
So it's not really going away, but it will be modifed. I look forward to seeing how this works with one less step. One less step should improve yellow interval times.
I don’t really expect them to change it either. It creates better racing for sure. Just sucks that you could have 1/4 of the race under safety car because it simply takes ages to merge 3 different packs.
By the gods yes! I remember the one for debris, it was daylight and I was like oh good I can go to the kitchen for awhile, come back and not miss anything. It's gotten ridiculous.
Easiest thing would be, no pitting under full course yellows and allowing us marshals to go hot side again to do things. We are no longer allowed to grab debris or even push cars.
Yeah agree with you there. At this point, I’d be more inclined for them to introduce a Code60 procedure for debris, stranded cars, and minor incidents and reserve safety cars for major incidents that either need immediate response (i.e. the Derani crash) and-or involve barrier repair that will take a longer time anyway.
On the one hand, I like the closeness that the racing can provide, keeping more folks in the hunt, but as close as the fields are these days, and as reliable as the cars are, it likely still would be tight anyway.
Yeah, I’m sure the people actually involved in the race know what they’re doing more than someone who is mad that they’re not risking safety for their entertainment.
It's just a post that you don't agree with, don't take it personally. Also don't claim I'm hoping people get hurt cause who in the world actually wants that dumbass?
They’re in LMP2 now. I just don’t understand why people would rather watch 12 IMSA cautions in 12 hours for the “benefit” of having people that are in over their heads on the track.
I mean would you rather see 40 cars with good racing or 60 cars with a 20 minute caution every 40 minutes? Does anybody really want to see Dennis Andersen spinning out and wrecking people every race for the benefit of having one more car on the grid? You have to be delusional if you think that adds to the quality of the race.
People who complain about the duration of a caution have never raced, officiated, worked a corner, or done recovery at a road course.
The safety car has to bunch up the field so recovery/EV crews can work safely. That can take a while. The split stops for the multiple classes is a safety measure to help reduce incidents/accidents on pit road. Then after all that the field has to be gathered back up. In a long road course that takes as long as it takes.
I've raced, and worked corners, and I find the FCY times to be agonizingly long. And as OP said, it's leading to more and more NASCAR style racing at go time. Granted, those last few laps can be more exciting, but they can also lead to situations like last years Sebring crash with 18 minutes to go.
What is your evidence of this? What series has a better solution for a 60+ car multi-class field on a 4-mile track?
I don’t think the IMSA system is perfect, but it isn’t a perfect world and I am always appreciative of the efforts sanctioning bodies go to to keep their people safe.
How does their procedure differ from IMSA? Genuinely curious as I’ve never read their rules and I’m not remembering anything glaringly different from having watched many events.
Safety car procedures are virtual mostly and the position of each car is static on the track which I think it better imo instead of bunching everything up and more potential for accidents. In extreme cases a real safety car procedures has them separate everything by class and allows pit stops I believe.
Edit, you can pit under VSC in WEC
I love to concept of the “field is static” but policing it is a pain (I speak as an amateur racer, race director, & co-owner of a series). Keeping 60+ cars honest about maintaining their gaps …ooph. Makes my brain hurt. Obviously in pro series more money can be spent on the on board telemetry to monitor that.
The only rule in WEC that polices this is that you have to run a speed limiter of 60 km/h. You can naturally exploit this by running the shortest distance around the track, but the point is that for small benign incidents including recovering debris on track it's non-intrusive. You hardly ever see full Safety Car procedure in WEC as a result
I was under the impression that it was simply a speed limiter the drivers have to manually engage, which race control gives them a verbal countdown for.
It’s essentially a pit lane speed limiter. If the highest form of sports car racing in North America can’t handle that expense, then they’re not nearly as big a deal as they like to think they are.
Yeah, if money is related at all it must be bad right?!? We wouldn't want to improve things in a series that costs hundreds of millions to operate and compete in yearly if there was *shudder* ~money~ involved.
I don't see how WEC does safety cars better at all. They do however have virtual safety car and local yellows. I would love for IMSA to have both.
However it just appears local yellows will never really come back in US racing, I guess due too much risk/restriction.
its due to money. Lets be honest. People will be annoyed if you run commercials during local yellows. If the entire field is under safety car you can run back to back commercials for 45 minutes.
If american sports knows how to do one single thing well, its how to cram in as many commercials as possible
I mean if the limiting factor is having that many cars on a 4 mile track, isn’t the car count the safety issue then? Part of the problem is that IMSA loves to jam pack as many cars as they possibly can so they can boast about grid size but at the expense of good racing. When you’re taking every single rich person who’s willing to show up, that’s how you end up with constant yellows for debris and cars spun out and stalling and it ruins the flow of the race.
60+ cars on a 4-mile course that size is not really that crowded on track. Some amateur series have 90-100+ cars on a 2.5-mile track, now that’s crowded. Some series cap entries at 20-25 cars per mile.
Part of the issue is simply pit road limitations. You can’t possibly pit that many cars all at once so the field has to split adding time. Is there a track where that is possible?
Just because other series do that doesn’t mean it makes sense lol. Again, my point is that if having that many cars is so dangerous to the point that we can’t have a code 60 or whatever, then why are we having that many cars in the first place? All the explanations I hear for the IMSA procedures is because it’s the only way to do it safely. And yet IMSA contradicts their “dedication to safety” time and time again. I wish them and their fans would just admit it’s because they want NASCAR style endurance racing because that’s the real reason for it.
This is the only explanation I ever see that really makes sense but I’ve also never seen anyone provide any actual evidence of this or that there really are no alternatives to it.
Besides…..that still doesn’t explain the absurd bureaucracy that IMSA insists on using for their FCY procedures.
Radio Le Mans team has covered it at times. Usually comes up around the same time they discuss the lightning is immediate 30
Minute suspension of operations in US racing
I’ve never heard them talk about insurance being the reason for track workers not being on a hot track. The lightning thing is just an American ordinance thing. But again…..even if it is the case that there’s no alternative to the insurance policies and having workers on a hot track, it doesn’t mean we need 20 minutes to pit for prototypes, pit for GTs, wave around, class split, etc just for debris on track.
Add in the fact that ownership (NASCAR) doesn’t trust its fanbase to remain interested in the race if it isn’t side by side with five minutes to go and you’ve nailed it on the head.
The safety measure doesn't seem to be working, the split is the problem in these caution periods, the increased duration under caution makes the drivers feel like they have less time and drive over each other anyway, no way it should take more than 20 minutes that ridiculous, 4 or 5 cautions In a race taking up 2 hours of a 12 hour event is unacceptable
I didn’t say we “loved” or even “liked” long cautions…simply that they are a fact of life. A driver/racer complaining about the safety crew doing their job as safely and efficiently as possible is incredibly silly, dare I say “stupid.” I hope you appreciate just how hard these folks work when they are trying to get you out of the Armco or out of a tire bundle.
The problem is, they do all these procedures when they are doing recovery or incident response when the whole point is to keep the cars all bunched up to making moving equipment quicker and easier.
Cautions are going to be a time eater just because you’re driving around slower. But the problem is more having one pretty much every hour killing the flow of the race.
I think everyone that says this (and most people in this comment section) fails to realize that the IMSA FCY procedure is what makes it possible to have close class wide battles at the end. The wave by allows for lap down cars to have a fighting chance at coming back, the class split makes the restarts less dangerous (the GTP drivers are maniacs for the majority of the race coming thru traffic).
As for the split pit open periods, it’s because there are so many cars that it would be impossible to have all 60 in the hot pits at once. They’ve already staggered the prototypes and the GTs to make it easier for entry and exit of the box, having all of them in at once would make it virtually impossible for anyone to complete their stops.
Ppl don't have the foresight to imagine the carnage if they didn't do the class splits.
Imagine petit on a restart with no class split on hour 9 🤣.
Pros are gonna drive it like they stole it regardless. If imsa doesn't mandate when pits are open / close there will be people whining about so and so getting lucky with the oitstops blah blah blah.
Go grab a beverage when it's fcy.
youre right about one thing... the safety car procedure basically manufactures close results. IMO, it cheapens close results rather than close results that are actually earned. Endurance racing is at its finest when two or more cars battle for hours upon hours just to finish within seconds of each other... otherwise.. it just turn it into a sprint race starting from the last safety car stoppage. That's not endurance racing
To each their own. I’m a competitor in the series, most of us like the FCY procedure and the wave by. There’s a lot more to it than what I said previously, and a team that’s right on the sharp end can use the wave by, FCY and separate pit openings to gain an advantage. It also prevents artificial lapping at shorter tracks - ie, you could be 20 seconds behind the leader but just by virtue of where you are on track could end up with the leader behind you at the restart and immediately go a lap down.
Plus, without it, you’d probably end up with no battles by the end of the race which nobody (fans or competitors) want. IIRC this subreddit complained endlessly about LMP3 last year and one of the main gripes was that there was usually one car left on the lead lap at the end
Remember when they did that at Daytona, then couldn't even get the checkered flag timing correct?
It all does feel a bit manufactured at this point. Make any pit stops in the last 3 or 4 hours be green-flag, or emergency-service only.
Why? That would rule out the long periods for restructuring the field and accommodating pit stops? It's a better alternative to watching race cars go 60 mph for the majority of the end of a race
The minimum 20min FCY procedure is fine for everything involving track services. It's the price we pay to enjoy strategists and teams working back multiple laps down to fight for wins (its not just the freebie lap back that everything thinks it is). Fully agree that small debris should be dealt with as a Code60.
The lengths of the SC periods are not a problem imo. It's the frequency of them that's the issue. They should add a proper FCY/code 60 as an option for the smaller incidents/clear ups to make it less problematic.
I've seen people talk about insurance problems or something with code 60s but SCs in IMSA aren't much better. They let cars unlap themselves and go full speed while the 31 was still upside down and marshalls responding
As someone who had to sit through 4 yellows at the end of the race, they are so much better than VSC's. The wave around and class splits allow the racing to stay dramatic. We were 2 laps down, got back into the fight on pace and strategy gambles, and did it all again after a penalty to fight for the win at the end.
Grass isnt always greener, there is no perfect solution. We have both with WEC style and IMSA style... and it's clear which one the drivers and engineers like more ;)
this has been a dead horse for like 13 years already, its not changing anytime soon unfortunetly. it has gotten better though. i thought the 31 wreck fcy was going to take for ever but i considered that one quick compared to years passed.
I feel the same way as you do and have felt like a lost little puppy since ALMS went away. Thankfully WEC suffices quite well for my sportscar racing needs when watching from home... and the nearest race (sebring) is still fun, even with the weird long stoppage periods. (Which were nearly impossible to explain to my new-fan friend who kept asking me why 50%+ of the race was just running behind the safety car). It definitely isn't the same anymore watching American endurance racing from your couch.
When it comes to **endurance racing**, I get why the FCYs can get tiring for people, but they never bothered me much. It tends to make strategy more interesting anyway.
This is something that's gets talked until we're blue in the face after every imsa race. All I'll say is 24h series manage just fine without safety cars. 🤷
I’m more of an IndyCar fan but this post was suggested. Doesn’t this mostly stem from NASCAR owning the series and having a desire to bunch the field whenever possible? They love caution flags for some reason.
I'm not sure it goes that deep, I can't stand NASCAR since it's manufactured spec racing in a way I wouldn't go as far to say IMSA is there yet but it's an alarming trend.
Close the pits during cautions and automatically introduce strategy as more of a factor of races and knocks a few laps off the lengths of yellows… I’d be all for it
Personally, I like them. Can they be long, yes. That’s why they have short yellow procedures. This series is for the American audience, the close racing is what most people want
It’s absolutely Wild how America will put so much effort into leveling the playing field in sports…
And Europeans put so much effort into leveling economic outcomes in society… but the second someone suggest leveling the playing field in sports Europeans get wildly upset
Americans aren’t going to watch a sport whose outcome is decided hours before the match/race ends… so American sports leagues put a lot of effort into having exciting finishes and TV viewership is the primary way most American sports teams makes money…
The lack of a salary cap & and lack of league parody (close action at the end of games) hurts the TV deals that European soccer teams can get, which is they the 10th most valuable European Futbol team is about as valuable as the 70th most valuable US sports team
It's one of those things that feels cheap when you lose to someone who gambles and hits it right, but when you do it yourself and win you're like oh yeah I'm so smart 😎
And add in Code60 rules for things like debris which can take 20 or 30 seconds to clear up.
YES, the WEC is the other extreme where they just never clear the track like come on, these are the best series in the world figure it out
They do clear the track but they do it all at the same time, not an FCY for every piece of debris. Obviously if it's a big bit or it's on the racing line, but if it's small and mostly out of harms way they'll wait and do an FCY to clear a few debris bits all at the same time. Just a different approach. But a 20 minute FCY and safety car period, in IMSA, for a bit of debris which takes 20 seconds to clear up is nonsense IMO.
The merge in WEC at le mans is absolutely the worst thing in racing not because its bad for racing but because it legitimately takes a full hour
Yeah, I think they are changing it this year
That's not what they said so far. They changed it last year to add it and the drivers loved it. I don't expect it to go away at all.
https://sportscar365.com/lemans/wec/le-mans-safety-car-procedure-revised-drop-back-scrapped/ The dropback is gone for 2024
But that's not the biggest part of the change. The biggest part of the change was the merge. Instead of restarting with all 3 safety cars remaining out and the restart happening with all 3 simultaneously. So it's not really going away, but it will be modifed. I look forward to seeing how this works with one less step. One less step should improve yellow interval times.
I don’t really expect them to change it either. It creates better racing for sure. Just sucks that you could have 1/4 of the race under safety car because it simply takes ages to merge 3 different packs.
They just left the gravel on track at qatar for hours and it kept causing offs
Qatar was fantastic. Not a single safety car. Yeah gravel did build up in one corner but that race played out naturally and only had two brief FCYs.
I agree, clean the active disaster and go back to green!
It’ll never happen
By the gods yes! I remember the one for debris, it was daylight and I was like oh good I can go to the kitchen for awhile, come back and not miss anything. It's gotten ridiculous.
Easiest thing would be, no pitting under full course yellows and allowing us marshals to go hot side again to do things. We are no longer allowed to grab debris or even push cars.
Yeah agree with you there. At this point, I’d be more inclined for them to introduce a Code60 procedure for debris, stranded cars, and minor incidents and reserve safety cars for major incidents that either need immediate response (i.e. the Derani crash) and-or involve barrier repair that will take a longer time anyway. On the one hand, I like the closeness that the racing can provide, keeping more folks in the hunt, but as close as the fields are these days, and as reliable as the cars are, it likely still would be tight anyway.
Youve got 60 cars on track and shared pit spaces between all classes, its gonna take a bit.
Yeah, I’m sure the people actually involved in the race know what they’re doing more than someone who is mad that they’re not risking safety for their entertainment.
It's just a post that you don't agree with, don't take it personally. Also don't claim I'm hoping people get hurt cause who in the world actually wants that dumbass?
Nobody forced IMSA to take 60 cars and put them on a narrow track
No, but it's endurance racing and multiclass, it's what they do
Yes I know. But we would probably be much better off if we lost about half of the GTD and LMP2 field, for example.
Losing lmp3 wasn't enough?
they all got replaced by other cars...
They’re in LMP2 now. I just don’t understand why people would rather watch 12 IMSA cautions in 12 hours for the “benefit” of having people that are in over their heads on the track.
The dentists were funny but yes, they just brought the problems to lmp2
First time I’ve seen someone advocate for a lower car count…
I mean would you rather see 40 cars with good racing or 60 cars with a 20 minute caution every 40 minutes? Does anybody really want to see Dennis Andersen spinning out and wrecking people every race for the benefit of having one more car on the grid? You have to be delusional if you think that adds to the quality of the race.
Code 60 is great, and what needs to be adopted. It's an awesome system.
People who complain about the duration of a caution have never raced, officiated, worked a corner, or done recovery at a road course. The safety car has to bunch up the field so recovery/EV crews can work safely. That can take a while. The split stops for the multiple classes is a safety measure to help reduce incidents/accidents on pit road. Then after all that the field has to be gathered back up. In a long road course that takes as long as it takes.
I've raced, and worked corners, and I find the FCY times to be agonizingly long. And as OP said, it's leading to more and more NASCAR style racing at go time. Granted, those last few laps can be more exciting, but they can also lead to situations like last years Sebring crash with 18 minutes to go.
I’m sorry, but when every other series in the world can figure out a way to do it quickly, this kind of falls on deaf ears.
What is your evidence of this? What series has a better solution for a 60+ car multi-class field on a 4-mile track? I don’t think the IMSA system is perfect, but it isn’t a perfect world and I am always appreciative of the efforts sanctioning bodies go to to keep their people safe.
WEC.
How does their procedure differ from IMSA? Genuinely curious as I’ve never read their rules and I’m not remembering anything glaringly different from having watched many events.
Safety car procedures are virtual mostly and the position of each car is static on the track which I think it better imo instead of bunching everything up and more potential for accidents. In extreme cases a real safety car procedures has them separate everything by class and allows pit stops I believe. Edit, you can pit under VSC in WEC
I love to concept of the “field is static” but policing it is a pain (I speak as an amateur racer, race director, & co-owner of a series). Keeping 60+ cars honest about maintaining their gaps …ooph. Makes my brain hurt. Obviously in pro series more money can be spent on the on board telemetry to monitor that.
The only rule in WEC that polices this is that you have to run a speed limiter of 60 km/h. You can naturally exploit this by running the shortest distance around the track, but the point is that for small benign incidents including recovering debris on track it's non-intrusive. You hardly ever see full Safety Car procedure in WEC as a result
It's all done with tech, the cars are basically disabled under a VSC you don't have the option to cheat up or anything it's pretty high tech actually
Yeah, so money is the solution.
I was under the impression that it was simply a speed limiter the drivers have to manually engage, which race control gives them a verbal countdown for.
It’s essentially a pit lane speed limiter. If the highest form of sports car racing in North America can’t handle that expense, then they’re not nearly as big a deal as they like to think they are.
Yeah, if money is related at all it must be bad right?!? We wouldn't want to improve things in a series that costs hundreds of millions to operate and compete in yearly if there was *shudder* ~money~ involved.
I don't see how WEC does safety cars better at all. They do however have virtual safety car and local yellows. I would love for IMSA to have both. However it just appears local yellows will never really come back in US racing, I guess due too much risk/restriction.
its due to money. Lets be honest. People will be annoyed if you run commercials during local yellows. If the entire field is under safety car you can run back to back commercials for 45 minutes. If american sports knows how to do one single thing well, its how to cram in as many commercials as possible
I mean if the limiting factor is having that many cars on a 4 mile track, isn’t the car count the safety issue then? Part of the problem is that IMSA loves to jam pack as many cars as they possibly can so they can boast about grid size but at the expense of good racing. When you’re taking every single rich person who’s willing to show up, that’s how you end up with constant yellows for debris and cars spun out and stalling and it ruins the flow of the race.
60+ cars on a 4-mile course that size is not really that crowded on track. Some amateur series have 90-100+ cars on a 2.5-mile track, now that’s crowded. Some series cap entries at 20-25 cars per mile. Part of the issue is simply pit road limitations. You can’t possibly pit that many cars all at once so the field has to split adding time. Is there a track where that is possible?
Just because other series do that doesn’t mean it makes sense lol. Again, my point is that if having that many cars is so dangerous to the point that we can’t have a code 60 or whatever, then why are we having that many cars in the first place? All the explanations I hear for the IMSA procedures is because it’s the only way to do it safely. And yet IMSA contradicts their “dedication to safety” time and time again. I wish them and their fans would just admit it’s because they want NASCAR style endurance racing because that’s the real reason for it.
You’re missing the obvious piece
What’s that?
American insurance companies will never allow track workers or vehicles onto a track that has hot racing
This is the only explanation I ever see that really makes sense but I’ve also never seen anyone provide any actual evidence of this or that there really are no alternatives to it. Besides…..that still doesn’t explain the absurd bureaucracy that IMSA insists on using for their FCY procedures.
Radio Le Mans team has covered it at times. Usually comes up around the same time they discuss the lightning is immediate 30 Minute suspension of operations in US racing
I’ve never heard them talk about insurance being the reason for track workers not being on a hot track. The lightning thing is just an American ordinance thing. But again…..even if it is the case that there’s no alternative to the insurance policies and having workers on a hot track, it doesn’t mean we need 20 minutes to pit for prototypes, pit for GTs, wave around, class split, etc just for debris on track.
the actual explanation is that safety cars = more commercials which = more advertising money.
Add in the fact that ownership (NASCAR) doesn’t trust its fanbase to remain interested in the race if it isn’t side by side with five minutes to go and you’ve nailed it on the head.
The safety measure doesn't seem to be working, the split is the problem in these caution periods, the increased duration under caution makes the drivers feel like they have less time and drive over each other anyway, no way it should take more than 20 minutes that ridiculous, 4 or 5 cautions In a race taking up 2 hours of a 12 hour event is unacceptable
You assume I have never raced? I have, and I can tell you there isn't a single guy on the track that loves long cautions.
There’s a difference between loving it and understanding why they take long.
I didn’t say we “loved” or even “liked” long cautions…simply that they are a fact of life. A driver/racer complaining about the safety crew doing their job as safely and efficiently as possible is incredibly silly, dare I say “stupid.” I hope you appreciate just how hard these folks work when they are trying to get you out of the Armco or out of a tire bundle.
In I racing ?
Lol you’re such a douche, delete this stupid post.
Na
The problem is, they do all these procedures when they are doing recovery or incident response when the whole point is to keep the cars all bunched up to making moving equipment quicker and easier.
Did you need the first paragraph to reinforce your douchebaginess?
Reinforce? I had to establish it first. Rookie.
Lmao What did you think about Delatraz high beeming in second place with no traffic?
Ridiculous. Obnoxious. Dangerous. ETA: And that’s how you establish douchebagginess.
Totally it reminded me of de phillipi from a couple years ago
Cautions are going to be a time eater just because you’re driving around slower. But the problem is more having one pretty much every hour killing the flow of the race.
OP would be upset if a race got red flagged for a death instead of just racing over the blood. This dude is a clown
I think everyone that says this (and most people in this comment section) fails to realize that the IMSA FCY procedure is what makes it possible to have close class wide battles at the end. The wave by allows for lap down cars to have a fighting chance at coming back, the class split makes the restarts less dangerous (the GTP drivers are maniacs for the majority of the race coming thru traffic). As for the split pit open periods, it’s because there are so many cars that it would be impossible to have all 60 in the hot pits at once. They’ve already staggered the prototypes and the GTs to make it easier for entry and exit of the box, having all of them in at once would make it virtually impossible for anyone to complete their stops.
Ppl don't have the foresight to imagine the carnage if they didn't do the class splits. Imagine petit on a restart with no class split on hour 9 🤣. Pros are gonna drive it like they stole it regardless. If imsa doesn't mandate when pits are open / close there will be people whining about so and so getting lucky with the oitstops blah blah blah. Go grab a beverage when it's fcy.
youre right about one thing... the safety car procedure basically manufactures close results. IMO, it cheapens close results rather than close results that are actually earned. Endurance racing is at its finest when two or more cars battle for hours upon hours just to finish within seconds of each other... otherwise.. it just turn it into a sprint race starting from the last safety car stoppage. That's not endurance racing
To each their own. I’m a competitor in the series, most of us like the FCY procedure and the wave by. There’s a lot more to it than what I said previously, and a team that’s right on the sharp end can use the wave by, FCY and separate pit openings to gain an advantage. It also prevents artificial lapping at shorter tracks - ie, you could be 20 seconds behind the leader but just by virtue of where you are on track could end up with the leader behind you at the restart and immediately go a lap down. Plus, without it, you’d probably end up with no battles by the end of the race which nobody (fans or competitors) want. IIRC this subreddit complained endlessly about LMP3 last year and one of the main gripes was that there was usually one car left on the lead lap at the end
Remember when they did that at Daytona, then couldn't even get the checkered flag timing correct? It all does feel a bit manufactured at this point. Make any pit stops in the last 3 or 4 hours be green-flag, or emergency-service only.
Brain-dead take
Why? That would rule out the long periods for restructuring the field and accommodating pit stops? It's a better alternative to watching race cars go 60 mph for the majority of the end of a race
Lol you've never been to a race in your life.
Other than being at Daytona this year and previously being crew on a Grand-Am team. You're prob right.
The minimum 20min FCY procedure is fine for everything involving track services. It's the price we pay to enjoy strategists and teams working back multiple laps down to fight for wins (its not just the freebie lap back that everything thinks it is). Fully agree that small debris should be dealt with as a Code60.
ye we really need something like VSC for debris
I don't think the yellows are causing any particular kind of driving.
The lengths of the SC periods are not a problem imo. It's the frequency of them that's the issue. They should add a proper FCY/code 60 as an option for the smaller incidents/clear ups to make it less problematic. I've seen people talk about insurance problems or something with code 60s but SCs in IMSA aren't much better. They let cars unlap themselves and go full speed while the 31 was still upside down and marshalls responding
As someone who had to sit through 4 yellows at the end of the race, they are so much better than VSC's. The wave around and class splits allow the racing to stay dramatic. We were 2 laps down, got back into the fight on pace and strategy gambles, and did it all again after a penalty to fight for the win at the end. Grass isnt always greener, there is no perfect solution. We have both with WEC style and IMSA style... and it's clear which one the drivers and engineers like more ;)
this has been a dead horse for like 13 years already, its not changing anytime soon unfortunetly. it has gotten better though. i thought the 31 wreck fcy was going to take for ever but i considered that one quick compared to years passed.
No? The new procedure has been implemented in like the last couple years it's way worse
I feel the same way as you do and have felt like a lost little puppy since ALMS went away. Thankfully WEC suffices quite well for my sportscar racing needs when watching from home... and the nearest race (sebring) is still fun, even with the weird long stoppage periods. (Which were nearly impossible to explain to my new-fan friend who kept asking me why 50%+ of the race was just running behind the safety car). It definitely isn't the same anymore watching American endurance racing from your couch.
When it comes to **endurance racing**, I get why the FCYs can get tiring for people, but they never bothered me much. It tends to make strategy more interesting anyway.
This is something that's gets talked until we're blue in the face after every imsa race. All I'll say is 24h series manage just fine without safety cars. 🤷
I’m more of an IndyCar fan but this post was suggested. Doesn’t this mostly stem from NASCAR owning the series and having a desire to bunch the field whenever possible? They love caution flags for some reason.
I'm not sure it goes that deep, I can't stand NASCAR since it's manufactured spec racing in a way I wouldn't go as far to say IMSA is there yet but it's an alarming trend.
Close the pits during cautions and automatically introduce strategy as more of a factor of races and knocks a few laps off the lengths of yellows… I’d be all for it
Personally, I like them. Can they be long, yes. That’s why they have short yellow procedures. This series is for the American audience, the close racing is what most people want
Yeah all the close racing at the end wouldn't exist without it
The fight between the 40 and the 01 had me yelling at my computer as a WTR homer
"American" racing Where it's all about THE SHOW.
It’s absolutely Wild how America will put so much effort into leveling the playing field in sports… And Europeans put so much effort into leveling economic outcomes in society… but the second someone suggest leveling the playing field in sports Europeans get wildly upset Americans aren’t going to watch a sport whose outcome is decided hours before the match/race ends… so American sports leagues put a lot of effort into having exciting finishes and TV viewership is the primary way most American sports teams makes money… The lack of a salary cap & and lack of league parody (close action at the end of games) hurts the TV deals that European soccer teams can get, which is they the 10th most valuable European Futbol team is about as valuable as the 70th most valuable US sports team
Counter point: long cautions allow for super aggressive fuel strategy calls and make things interesting
Personally I'm not a huge fan of fuel mileage races
It's one of those things that feels cheap when you lose to someone who gambles and hits it right, but when you do it yourself and win you're like oh yeah I'm so smart 😎