OPINION: Why I think endurance racing needs safety cars
- Aaron Carroll
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Written by Aaron Carroll, Edited by Tarun Suresh
The most obvious skill required to compete in endurance racing is endurance. It may sound trivial, but it's the single most fundamental thing required to cover the distance of three, six, twelve, twenty-four or any amount of hours in between. But breaks can be good too.
By breaks, I, of course, mean safety cars. Safety cars come out to neutralise the race, usually because there has been an incident on track, and the marshalls and track staff need ample space and time to clear up the incident in a safe manner.
In endurance racing, of course, significantly more distance is covered compared to your average motor race. So, therefore, the gaps - generally - get bigger as time goes on, and that breeds less action.
A late race incident, as a lead car tries to slice its way through slower traffic, can completely change the outcome. What it does is essentially turn a 24-hour race with an hour left into a 60-minute sprint race, putting fans on the edge of their seats.
The most recent example of this was the season opener of the ELMS (European Le Mans Series).
A safety car with just a handful of minutes left bunched up the pack and set Matthieu Vaxivière up perfectly to go from fourth to first in the final two laps of the race, making a last-lap overtake to seal the win.
On the other hand, you have the season opener from GTWC (GT World Challenge) Europe. During the six-hour event at the Circuit Paul Ricard, there were four FCYs (Full-Course Yellows) and not one safety car.
This meant that the field never got bunched up again after the start. Granted, the winning margin was under five seconds, but after that, you can see much larger gaps. For example, the gap from second to third was just over half a minute.
The spread-out nature of the field left sections of the race being relatively boring. Thankfully, GTWC is one of the pinnacles of professional GT3 racing, so the race wasn’t completely boring.
A race like that becomes ‘completely boring’ as you increase the distance covered.
The 24H Series, run by Creventic, held its flagship event, the Dubai 24H, in January this year. In the 24H Series, safety cars aren’t used at all. All incidents are covered under FCYs. That meant that for the entire race, the cars never bunched back up.
In that race, the winning No.777 BMW beat the second-placed No.92 Porsche by an entire lap. The smallest winning margin in any of the classes was just under one minute. So it’s safe to assume that the race itself was very boring.
When you look at it in that sense, safety cars are a brilliant thing for endurance racing. So why not just create more of them?
Well, you could take a leaf out of NASCAR’s book and just artificially have a safety car at set points in the race, or alter the idea slightly so that it appears when the gaps get to a certain size.
Personally, I am not a fan of this at all, and I doubt many endurance racing fans would feel different. The stoppage is too artificial; you might as well split the race, for example, six hours, into three shorter two-hour races across the weekend. At that point, you lose the entire ‘endurance’ element of the racing.
But what if you split the race up, but it was still the same race each time? Essentially putting breaks into the race. This is something Creventic do in the European leg of their 24H Series championship.
For example, at the 12 Hours of Spa, the first five hours of the race take place on Saturday. The race will then finish as if it were a five-hour event, but no trophies would be awarded at the end. Instead, everyone would come back the next morning for the final seven hours of the race, with the grid set from Saturday's results.
Again, this isn’t something that appeals to me. Sure, the field gets bunched back up and the racing gets closer again, but you're taking the endurance out of endurance racing by splitting it up. It creates the same problem as the NASCAR situation.
Each and every solution you can think of would have a similar issue to the two above. It’s just too artificial, it’s too fake.
The main reason why people tune into endurance racing - or live sports in general - is the excitement of not knowing. Not knowing who will win, or not knowing what will happen next.
So at the end of it all, I came to the conclusion that nothing can - or should - be done.
From time to time, in different series across the world, endurance racing will get particularly boring - that's the case with most sports. Trying to eliminate these lulls in the racing creates a predictable system, which would ruin the point of the sport for many, including myself.
I realised that I would happily sit through another Dubai 24H where a BMW wins by over a lap, if that means two weeks later I get to see two Porsches and an Acura fighting for the win of the Rolex 24 at Daytona in the dying moments of the race.
Even in these two examples, two very different systems create two very different results. In Dubai, no safety cars are used. Whereas in Daytona, every incident triggered a safety car, which in turn triggered pit stops and wave-bys.
So the Dubai 24H would appeal to those who are more traditional and want pure racing with nothing artificial getting in the way, while everyone else would enjoy the excitement created by a late safety car at Daytona.
So, in conclusion, yes, I believe endurance racing does need safety cars to be more exciting, but that doesn’t mean we have to force them into the racing. With the competitive nature of modern endurance racing, they will most likely happen anyway, and in the series where they won’t, that's fine too if it appeals to its own audience.
At the end of the day, we should all just be grateful that we can enjoy this ‘golden era’ of sportscar racing, and look forward to much closer racing, whether it's safety car affected or not.
