Were they sandbagging?
by Boris Deshev, Ph. D.
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Endurance racing is primarily about managing your resources. Managing your energy, managing your tires, managing your brakes, managing your power unit, managing your drivers, and ultimately - managing your pace.
We use the data from the entire 2023 WEC season, kindly provided by FIA WEC and Al Kamel Systems, to see how hard each hypercar team has been pushing during the season and if someone has been sandbagging. Of course, the only one who could possibly benefit from sandbagging is the winner.
PACE GAP
In order to estimate this we first estimate each car’s ultimate pace per race. This is the lap time comprised of the three fastest sectors that the given car has done during the entire race weekend. This is usually a tenth of a second or so faster than the fastest complete lap that the car has done.
After that we take the median lap time of every car on every race as a representation of the pace they maintained during the race. The median is taken after discarding all the pit-in and pit-out laps, all the laps behind safety car, full-course-yellow as well as all laps affected by rain, thus leaving only the fast racing laps. The median lap is the middle lap when they are sorted by lap time, thus half of all racing laps are faster than it and half are slower. Expressing the median race lap time as a percentage of the fastest theoretical lap time is called pace gap and can give us an idea about how hard each team was pushing during the given race weekend.
Figure 1: The median lap time of every hypercar over the 2023 season expressed as a percentage of the fastest lap they are theoretically capable of. The redder the color, the further away they are from the fastest they can go.
There are some races where the race pace was uniformly lower for the entire field: Sebring and Fuji, to a lower extent, and Spa and Bahrain to greater. The race at Monza was the opposite, all the cars were, on average, closer to their ultimate pace at Monza than anywhere else. Those variations between races can be explained by varying track conditions between the qualification, when most of the fastest sectors are recorded, and the race. The race at Spa is clearly deviant, likely due to the rain and cold ambient temperature.
Let’s cut to the point: of all teams and all races, Toyota are consistently showing some of the largest pace gap. In terms of pace gap, at Sebring they were 4th and 5th, at Portimao 2nd and 3rd, at Fuji 2nd and 3rd, at Bahrain 2nd and 3rd. At two of the remaining three tracks (Spa- 3rd and 10th and Le Mans 1st and 5th) they were not so prominently at the top of this parameter but the results were affected by long periods of rain and/or low ambient temperatures. At Monza they were 8th and 10th. This cannot be explained by changing track conditions but this was clearly deviant race because almost all teams were closer to their ultimate pace at Monza than they were almost anywhere else.
Figure 2: The 2023 season of car #2 - Cadillac Racing. The positions gained during each race against the gap between their ultimate pace and their median race pace.
When Toyota showed the large pace gap, there were only two cars that were consistently up there with them: #4 Floyd Vanwall and #2 Cadillac Racing. Car #4 was regularly struggling for pace and they have generally been outliers in almost all the stats from this season. Cadillac’s pace gap actually reflects genuine lack of race pace. This is demonstrated on Figure 2 which shows the number of positions they have gained/lost during the races, against the pace gap they had. Apart of the races at Spa and Monza, which we discussed above, there is a very tight correlation between the gained positions and the pace gap.
The story with Toyota is different! They usually start first and finish first. The only exceptions were Sebring (starting 2nd and finished 1st) and Le Mans (starting 3rd and finished 2nd). In the qualification they do their best to start at the front. So much so that at Bahrain they decided to qualify on the softer tires. During the race, they are managing their pace. Obviously they did not need to go any faster than they did, and this is reflected in their large pace gap. This was also pointed out in an earlier article, analyzing the 2023 race at Spa.
HOW MUCH PACE THEY COULD HAVE HIDDEN?
In Bahrain the Toyotas qualified on the softer tires, so this artificially increases their pace gap, and we do not know the actual pace difference between the two tire compounds. So we have to look at the previous race.
The average pace gap for the entire hypercar field, excluding the Toyotas at Fuji was 104.005%. The average pace gap for the two Toyota cars during the same race was 104.710%. So, they should have been able to go 0.7% closer to their ultimate pace. This assumes they are not any more capable of managing their tires than all the other teams, which is unrealistic given that they are by far the most experienced hypercar team. At Fuji, the fastest theoretical lap for Toyota #7 was 1:27.577 (the fastest lap they drove was 1:27.794). Going 0.7% faster would give them another 0.6 seconds per lap! Over the course of the race (229 laps) they could have been another 2 minutes and 17 seconds, or a lap and a half further ahead.
The median lap time of the #7 Toyota at Fuji was 1:32.033. Going 0.6 seconds faster would mean a median of 1:31.433. They did at least 25 laps faster than that. What this article claims is that they could have done half of the race faster than that.
The rest of the hypercar field needs to pull something rather special out of the hat in order to challenge Toyota next year.
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