The finale in Bahrain of the truly spectacular 2023 season saw the long coming race victory for the Iron Dames team finally materialize. We saw the Aston Martin Vantage GTE being the fastest LMGTE machine, bar one pink Porsche, with the fleet of Astons finishing second and third and the last of them retiring from fourth less than half an hour before the end of the race. We also sow the class champions from Corvette Racing finally having a day off during a race weekend. As we wave goodbye to the LMGTE machines we take a deep dive into the data from the race, generously provided by FIA WEC and Al Kamel Systems, to try and understand what determined the finishing order in the race.

Figure 2 shows a simple two-parameter model explaining the finishing order of all LMGTE cars that finished the race. The two parameters are average race pace (shown in the first column) and average race pace with the total pit time divided by the total number of laps done by every car added to it (shown in the middle column). Because of the lack of safety car periods and post-race penalties these two parameters prove sufficient to explain the exact finishing order. The main difference between this model and the one employed for the hypercar class is the usage of average instead of median to represent the race pace. The reason for that is the presence of drivers of different ranking in the LMGTE class. Median is preferred for relatively homogeneous distributions for its robustness against a small number of outliers. The lap times distributions in the LMGTE class tend not to be homogeneous as the bronze-rated drivers are usually slower than the professionals. The minimum driving time for bronze-rated drivers of 2 hours and 20 minutes in Bahrain means that the median is not adequate description of the lap times distribution.

The model describes the finishing order perfectly. We see that D’station racing's car #777, lost the race in the pit. Their race pace was marginally faster than that of the Iron Dames’ car #85, on average by 0.0178 seconds per lap. While both teams did the race on 7 pit stops, D’station’s ones took a little longer for a total of 15 seconds more than the Dames’ stops. At the end the #777 car finished 5 seconds behind #85. Those are tiny differences for an eight hour race.

The Iron Lynx car #60 is not shown on Figure 2 as it did not finish the race. It would have been at the very top of the pace ranking as it was only driven by the professional drivers in the team. The car retired because their bronze-rated driver and team owner- Claudio Schiavoni, fell ill and was unable to take to the track.

The teams that lost positions due to longer or more numerous pit stops are #83 Richard Mille AF Corse, #77 Dempsey-Proton Racing and #56 Project 1-AO. All spent well over 10 minutes in total in the pit and lost 1, 2 and 3 positions, respectively. Car #56 visited the pit 10 times for a total of 11 minutes and 18 seconds. On the other hand, #54 AF Corse, #33 Corvette Racing and #86 GR Racing gained two positions each due to superior pit work and no in-race penalties, on top of their respective pace ranking. All of them spent less than 10 minutes in the pit with #54 being 20 seconds faster in the pit than the winning car #85 - 9:24.786 against 9:44.849.

Pace-wise there is little between the different makes. The left column on Figure 2 shows a relatively well mixed field behind the #777 Aston and the #85 Porsche which were clear ahead of the rest. The average race pace difference between the first and the tenth car in the LMGTE field in Bahrain was 0.553 seconds per lap, with the #21AF Corse car lagging another second behind. For comparison the gap between the first and the tenth fastest car in the hypercar class (#8 and #93) was 1.048 seconds. Remarkably, in the for-all-intents-and-purposes spec series LMP2 class this gap (between #23 to #35) was 1.219 seconds per lap. An even more instructive comparison- the average lap time difference between the fastest and the tenth fastest driver in the 2023 Formula 1 Bahrain Grand Prix (#33 and #77) was 1.307 seconds per lap! Of course, the Grand Prix is less than 20% of the length of the WEC race. In all of the above the average lap time is taken after removing all unusually slow laps (pit-in, pit-out and non-green flag laps).

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