Against all odds

In the second installment in our series on Balance of Performance Racecar’s very own expert – an SRO and VLN BoP provider – outlines those things that make his job easy, and those that make it difficult. You might not be surprised at which is the longer list …

- SCOTT RAYMOND

In the previous article (December, V29N12) we discussed the importance of objective decision making in the world of Balance of Performance. Without objective decision making, the decisions become overly political or devolve into guessing. Either way, you are bound to annoy a lot of people.

Now that we understand how critical being objective is, we need to understand more about the scope of the problem we are trying to solve. So, in this article we will first discuss some of the things that are helpful for BoP and then some of the things that make BoP difficult. The list of helpful things pales in comparison to the list of difficult things.

When it comes to helping the BoP process – to make objective decision making easier – there is only one place to start, and that is with design and set-up parameters that have first-order effects on vehicle performance. In this respect I am referring to two things: the overall design philosophy for a vehicle, and the tyres. The FIA has helped to greatly decrease the variability between the as-designed performance of cars by defining homologation regulations and expected performance windows. These performance windows were created to help manufacturers design cars that will be competitive with other cars in the same class of racing straight out of the box.