Sandbaggers will outsmart IMSA again

Scott Atherton is naive if he thinks sandbaggers will show their true potential and get hit with a weight or power penalty just for a good pit stall

IMSA President Scott Atherton hopes adding a qualifying session to Sunday’s Roar Before The 24 will eliminate sandbagging in advance of the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season-opener, but of course it won't because where you pit or where your garage is located in a 24 hour means absolutely zero.

A set of 15-minute qualifying sessions on Sunday morning for the Prototype, GT Le Mans and GT Daytona classes will determine the pit box and garage locations for the Rolex 24, something Atherton hopes will encourage teams to show their full speed three weeks before the event.

MSA has always used the Roar test session to make adjustments to the Balance of Performance. However, teams always mask their full potential over the weekend, with the intent of avoiding technical regulations intended to encourage parity.

However, the Cadillac DPi-V.R prototype was considerably faster than the rest of the division during the race last season, and IMSA hopes this session will remove elements of gamesmanship, put they are terribly mistaken.

"Part of this weekend is always focused on our technical team extracting as much data and as much demonstrated performance awareness that we could pull out of these weekends," Atherton said during a press conference at Daytona on Friday afternoon. "It’s all about the modern era of Balance of Performance. It’s a necessary function.

"We’re very proud of the work that IMSA’s technical team has done. It will never be perfected but it’s a very, very high level of sophistication and I think very effective in how it enables very diverse cars to compete very fairly with each other."

"Sunday’s qualifying is the ultimate example because the top qualifying results will then get their first pick for their pit location as well as their garage location," Atherton said. "In the rules and regulations, it’s very well spelled out how this process will work."

The fastest-qualifying Prototype entry will receive the first pit box on pit lane starting at pit-in and also will be assigned to the first garage in its section in the garage, with the fastest GTD car receiving the second pit box and first GTD garage.

The fastest GTLM entry will receive the third pit box and first garage in its section, and so on.

This is important because pit box locations are a matter of logistical value during the race, with the first box at pit-in acting as the most desired location due to its close proximity to the garage.

"The bottom line is to provide an incentive for the cars, teams and drivers to truly show what they’ve got," Atherton said. "It’s not my original statement but I’ll repeat a comment that was made to me last night. That was, 'You guys have finally found a way to shake the sand out of these cars.' I hope that’s true.

"The goal here is to have as level a playing field as possible, such that the real deciding factor comes down to driver skill, pit stop skill, engineering skill, race strategy skill, etc., and not having a mechanical advantage that’s baked into one platform versus the other."