Why BoP caused the 2025 Le Mans 24 Hours to underwhelm

Journalists are a whiny lot. I’m forever telling my friends that. We like a good moan. My colleagues and I complain about the Balance of Performance, harking back to the days when the manufacturers took the technical regulations, built racing cars and off they went to the race track. And then we complain about the BoP when it doesn’t do its job. 

Can we have it both ways? Of course we can! There’s no point if you have BoP in the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class, as well as GTP in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in the States, and it doesn’t balance the performance of the cars. It certainly didn’t do what it says on the tin at this year’s Le Mans 24 Hours. 

We had one manufacturer in Ferrari that was clearly in the ascendent. Forget about the 14 seconds it had in hand over Porsche at the finish, a margin of victory smaller by tenths than last year. The simple truth is that the Italian manufacturer was dominant. 

But for a few errors on its part, we would have been talking after the race about a Ferrari 1-2-3, at least until the disqualification of the #50 car that crossed the line in fourth. The last podium lock-out, Audi’s in 2012, came in very different circumstances. It was Toyota’s first Le Mans since 1999 and there were no other true manufacturer programmes in the top class of the born-again WEC.

The smart money was always on Ferrari to make it three in a row at Le Mans last weekend: it was favourite no matter how hard it tried to shrug off that tag. But no one was expecting it to have things all its own way.

Rather it seemed that we were going to have multiple manufacturers in the hunt. The events in the WEC the last time out at Spa in May suggested that we would have a fight on our hands.

A Ferrari has won every race of WEC 2025

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt

The rule makers, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest and the FIA, have promised what they call “100% convergence” of the performance of the cars under the BoP. After that, the race should come down to execution on the part of the teams and drivers. The second-placed Porsche had a race as near-perfect as you are going to get, yet couldn’t beat a car that had been delayed by two penalties and an off. 

It’s also worth talking about the average pace of the drivers in the winning AF Corse Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercar, the satellite entry that doesn’t score manufacturers’ points, with Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Phil Hanson at the wheel and the Penske Porsche 963 LMDh shared by Kevin Estre, Laurens Vanthoor and Matt Campbell. The Porsche trio were separated by two tenths on a 50-lap average, five tenths if you widen the sample to 75 laps. Kubica was well clear of his team-mates: the span was 1.3s over 50 laps and a shade more over 75. So who wrung the maximum out of their machine over the 387 laps of the 93rd running of the Le Mans 24 Hours? Porsche Penske Motorsport and not AF Corse. 

If you work on the principles laid down by the ACO and the FIA, then the Porsche should have won. If you need any further evidence that the rule makers got it wrong at Le Mans, you only have to look to Alpine, BMW and Peugeot. All three were genuine podium contenders at Spa, yet they weren’t remotely in the game at Le Mans.

The 2025 Le Mans 24 Hours was a damp squib of an affair, not what it could or arguably should have been. We’re meant to be in a golden age of sportscar racing, but where was the glow at the most important race of the WEC season? The shine was taken off because the BoP wasn’t on the money

Quite frankly, they were nowhere. 

What needs to be said at this point is that you can’t just get rid of the BoP. It’s one of the foundation stones of the Hypercar category: that’s a building block of each of the Le Mans Hypercar and LMDh rule sets and, as a means of keeping costs under control, a key reason why the WEC is booming right now. Like it or lump it, we’re stuck with it for many years to come: the current Hypercar formula was extended last week through to the end of 2032. 

We’re on our third system of BoP since 2023 and the arrival of the first wave of LMDh machinery, and I wouldn’t be bold enough to say that any of them have worked as they should. There’s evidence that the new WEC system is an improvement. It is based on race performances from the previous three events and on the presumption that Ferrari made the biggest gains over the off-season – its diminishing advantage over the first three races at Qatar, Imola and Spa suggests we’ve got something approaching a workable system.

BoP is always a point of contention in sportscar racing

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

I understand that setting the BoP for Le Mans is a more difficult job than for Spa, Imola or anywhere else. It is based more on simulation rather than the race data used for the regular WEC races, courtesy of the unique characteristics of the 8.47-mile Circuit de la Sarthe. It stands distinct from the other venues on the WEC trail due to the three long blasts of the Mulsanne Straight and the one from its end to the Indianapolis sequence.  

But the organisers have a tool in power gain, which adjusts the maximum power figures of the car above 250km/h or 155mph, to balance the top speeds of the cars. The sad truth is that it didn’t do its job. 

There was a chance to change the BoP ahead of Le Mans. In the guidelines as written, a revision was permitted after the Le Mans Test Day the Sunday ahead of race week. It arguably wasn’t clear by then that the majority of the manufacturers were going to be bit-part players in the race, but it was increasingly so after practice. Even then a change could have come. 

Force majeure could have been claimed, just as it was in 2023. Back then the BoP system and the agreements with the participants that covered it were very different to today, but the chance for a change had passed when the ACO and the FIA unilaterally presented a new BoP just days before the cars were due on track at the Test Day. This time around they chose not to act in the face of all the evidence. 

So here I am sat complaining about my 35th edition of the great race even though the top two cars were separated by 14s, the second closest timed finish in history.

Maybe I was expecting too much, but for me the 2025 Le Mans 24 Hours was a damp squib of an affair, not what it could or arguably should have been. We’re meant to be in a golden age of sportscar racing, but where was the glow at the most important race of the WEC season? The shine was taken off because the BoP wasn’t on the money.

The 2025 Le Mans 24 Hours was not one for the ages

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz