The 6 Hours of Monza, 2023 was an exciting race. At the LMGTE-Am class new champions were crowned while others battled for victory. On Saturday, the Iron Dames car #85 took pole position with relative ease- 0.426 seconds ahead of the second-placed #25 Aston Martin of ORT by TF and a full 2.251 seconds ahead of the sister Porsche #60 of Iron Lynx, which qualified last. For comparison, the first seven Hypercars in the qualification were covered by 0.422 seconds. On Sunday, after 6 hours of racing, #60 finished second in class, 11.184 seconds behind the winning car while #85 finished fifth in class, a lap and a half behind the #60 car. Both cars are the same make and model- 911 RSR-19 by Porsche, both are operated by essentially the same team. Both cars ran the race on similar strategies and both made 6 pit stops over the six-hour-long race. Neither of them appeared to have any major technical issues and both of them had a minor bump with another car that did not seem to affect their pace or position. What defined these vastly contrasting fortunes then? We dig deep into the data, kindly provided by WEC and Al Kamel Systems, to try and answer this question.

PIT STOPS

Both, #60 and #85, opened the race with a triple stint by their respective bronze drivers. From that moment their strategies diverged slightly, with #85 double stinting over the rest of the race while #60 electing to change the driver on every pit stop over the remaining approximately 4 hours of the race. Maybe a move to give them a rest from the scorching heat out on that day but one that had little bearing on the pace the two cars maintained, as shown on Figure 1. In total #60 spent 7 minutes and 28.479 seconds in the pit while #85 did 7 minutes and 57.412 seconds. Almost half a minute advantage to #60 which falls short of explaining the two minutes lead they had on #85 at the checkered flag. The timing of the pit stops for #60 and #85 are shown on Figure 1 in relation to caution periods and overall race time.

Figure 1 shows a comparison of the entire 6-hour-long race at Monza for the Iron Dames and the Iron Lynx cars. The top panel shows the lap times. Faster laps sit near the top. The long streaks down indicate either a caution period (also denoted with a dark gray background) or a pit stop (marked with a small triangles in the corresponding color). The middle panel shows the gap in seconds between the two cars. The line color indicates which car was ahead. The bottom panel shows the positions of the two cars in the LMGTE-Am class.

During the first two hours of the race #85 car was consistently pulling away from #60 at a rate of approximately 3 seconds per lap! Most of the gained advantage was reset by the safety car (SC) and after the first driver change, a little over two hours and 70 laps into the race, it stood at around 20 seconds. From that moment on the pace maintained by the two cars was very similar. The denouement came at the second-to-last pit stops. The Iron Lynx car stopped on lap 125 with just under two hours to go. A Full Course Yellow (FCY) period which transitioned into SC followed immediately, for the #99 stopping on track. This completely negated the time loss that #60 incurred with respect to #85 and at the end of the caution period #85 was only 9 seconds ahead. The following lap #85 pitted from the lead loosing 5 positions and 81 seconds to the #60 due of the tightly packed field following the SC. This sequence ultimately determined the finishing order for the Iron * cars.

Following their last pit stop a slight pace advantage for the #60 was established which grew the gap to 90 seconds but was inconsequential for the final positions. During this period #85 got a slap from #51 Ferrari at the second chicane. You can see this moment on the top panel of Figure 1 as a ~3 seconds drop in pace just after the 05:30:00 mark. This moment, however, did not change the final results of the race. Additionally, two hours into the race #60 also reported a contact on track which also does not seem to have affected their consecutive performance.

CONCLUSIONS

The Iron Dames car had very strong pace during both the qualification and the race. They had no technical issues and had no unplanned pit stops. It was the timing of one of their pit stops that undid all their good work at Monza. The dice rolled badly for them this time and there is little they could have done to change that. One could, of course, question the necessity of a 15-minutes-long deployment of a safety car for a car stopped on track. Nevertheless, such situations are inherent to motorsport, and there will always be instances where some benefit while others suffer.

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