Why success handicaps in WEC is the wrong path

So success handicaps could be part of the landscape in the Hypercar class of the World Endurance Championship next year. Everyone wants close competition right at the front of the world’s premier sportscar series, and that’s something we haven’t always seen this year. But is pegging back cars based on their results the right way of going about it? Absolutely not, I would say.

Why the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, which jointly run the WEC, are looking at handicaps isn’t entirely clear at this stage. The failure to get the Balance of Performance right in 2025 has to be a factor, or at least the criticism they have received as a result of their struggles in that department. It probably explains why, when there was a proposal to do away with the BoP, the idea gained a bit of traction in some quarters among the powers that be.

That idea was kicked into touch courtesy of universal opposition from all the manufacturers save for the one that proposed it, which we can safely say was Ferrari. It seems to me that success handicaps are the next bus along.

Certainly they are being considered as an adjunct to the BoP, whatever form that takes next season. But my problem is that success handicaps - the snazzy, modern-day equivalent of the success ballast of old - stand diametrically opposed to the principles of the BoP in Hypercar. Or at least how they have been explained to me.

The BoP is meant to level the playing field to such an extent that the battle for victory, as well as the lesser positions, comes down to the performance of the drivers, strategy, reliability and the like. So a manufacturer, team and car crew do the business in all those departments, win a race and get slowed for the next one. That represents a significant change in philosophy, I would say.

The FIA and the ACO, along with the Hypercar manufacturers, need to heed the lessons of history as they contemplate the introduction of success handicaps. That’s wider motorsport history and their own past with the current iteration of the WEC.

The WEC is in a golden age of manufacturer involvement, but needs to heed lessons from the past to avoid repeat failures

Photo by: Andreas Beil

Think back to the All-Japan GT Championship (now Super GT) at the start of the century and its draconian system of weight penalties. Three years out of four between 2000 and 2004 the champion or champions didn’t win a race. Ensuring the ballast stayed off was the name of the game in the battle for the title. There’s a time and place for going into cruise and collect mode to rack up the points, but not right from the start of the season. That’s somehow anti-motor racing. Success ballast or handicaps might ensure the championship battle stays open right to the end of the season, but they tend to do nothing for the racing.

Success handicaps initially in its old-school form of simple ballast have been with us in the WEC’s pro-am GT class (GTE Am and now LMGT3) since the 2019/20 season. It is probably a good way of balancing out the bronze-rated amateurs. That’s where the big discrepancies are in driver performance. You should be able to find 100 platinums and golds who can lap within a tenth of each other, as many silvers who will be within two tenths, but the gaps between the bronzes can be much, much bigger.

There’s no need to replicate that in an all-pro class like Hypercar that boasts some of the best drivers in the world. Nor should we forget that the 2019-20 WEC, the COVID-interrupted, faltering last season of LMP1, struggled that little bit more thanks to a system of handicaps. It was meant to increase the spectacle, to keep it all close, but ended up doing the complete opposite.

The BoP is a necessary evil, one of the foundation stones of Hypercar’s phenomenal growth. But dumbing down the WEC yet further with success handicaps would surely be a step too far

We don’t know how a system for 2026 might end up working - there are but a handful of words in the sporting rules as they stand - but back in 2019-20 it didn’t work at all. It gave Rebellion Racing a couple of victories, pretty much win as you please affairs rather than the close-run scraps intended. More pertinently it destroyed the championship battle between the two cars from Toyota, the last manufacturer standing in P1 after the withdrawal of first Audi and then Porsche.

One problem was the extent of the time handicap. The per point co-efficient was increased by more than 50% between the announcement of the system and its first application at the second round of the championship at Fuji in October ’19. (I’m not going to go into detail here because, quite frankly, explaining what was a convoluted system would be a whole story on its own.) But I always got the impression that the FIA and the ACO panicked as it sought to follow up on its promise to ensure the P1 privateers had a chance: success handicaps were one of a number of measures put in place for that season to try to make that happen.

The upshot was that it meant one Toyota had a significant advantage over the other at any given race. And it turned out that the #7 driven by Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez had the lesser handicap in comparison with the #8 shared by Sebastien Buemi, Kazuki Nakajima and Brendon Hartley at the longer races when points and a half were up for grabs. Had regular points been on offer at those races, the championship would have gone the other way.

Success handicaps rather ruined the 2019-20 title fight between the Toyotas

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

If we do end up with a system of success handicaps next year, they won’t be in place for the Le Mans 24 Hours, just as they weren’t for the 2020 edition. The ACO has always told us that its centrepiece race is far too important to sully with success ballast, handicaps or whatever.

But should we end up with success handicaps in the rest of the WEC, what message would that send out? Aren’t we supposed to be in some kind of golden age of sportscar racing, a time of boom in terms of manufacturer participation. Next year we are going to again have eight OEMs competing in Hypercar and we should have 10 the season after.