They revealed their intent to revise the BoP for the double-points round of the World Endurance Championship to the manufacturers on Wednesday, Autosport has learned, just four days before the cars are due on track for the Le Mans Test Day on Sunday.
The changes were presented by the FIA and the ACO as done deal and there was no attempt to gain the unanimous agreement that in theory was necessary to make revisions outside the prescriptions of a new Hypercar system introduced for 2023.
As the ultimate arbiters of the series through a body known as the WEC Committee, the FIA and the ACO have exercised their right to make unilateral changes to the BoP.
This was tacitly acknowledged in a joint statement from the FIA and ACO released on Thursday morning, which described the new BoP table for Le Mans on 10/11 June as a “correction”.
It explained that it was necessary because the differences in the performance of cars built to the Le Mans Hypercar rules were “greater than initially anticipated”.
All seven participating marques in Hypercar were signatories to the new system, which was devised to prevent manufacturers hiding their true performance or sandbagging to gain a favourable BoP.
The BoP was set in stone for the first four races of the WEC up to and including Le Mans, with only a change in the balance between LMH and LMDh machinery, the so-called platform BoP, permissible in that period.
There was confusion over when this could take place under the agreement, which remains outside the public domain, but it was made clear that changes to the BoP for individual cars built to the two different rulesets in operation in Hypercar was only possible after Le Mans.
It is understood that the ACO president Pierre Fillon and Richard Mille, who is boss of the FIA’s Endurance Commission, drove the decision to make changes beyond the scope of the latest BoP guidelines ahead of the centenary edition of Le Mans.
Source: Autosport