Insight: How IMSA is Aiming to Capture the "Best Data" for BoP

Inside IMSA's quest for continuously improved Balance of Performance through data with VP of engineering Matt Kurdock...

When you think about data collection, the likes of Google and Meta often come to mind, with the two tech giants famously known for scraping user’s web data, sometimes for the good, but often for its own profits. In the motorsports world, there’s a different type of data collection that’s on the rise, and it’s happening in the wind tunnel, at the race track and even in simulation, all aimed to produce a more competitive on-track product.

Led by its managing director of engineering Matt Kurdock, IMSA’s technical department collects terabytes of data over the course of a season in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship but puts it all to good use, in its efforts to balance sometimes drastically different types of machinery in an attempt to help create the closest possible racing in its flagship GTP class and production-based categories.

While often having come under fire from fans, teams and manufacturers, the process of Balance of Performance, perhaps the most-dreaded three-word phrase in sports car racing, has become the necessary evil of the sport. But with increasingly more ways to collect performance-based data, IMSA is aiming for BoP not to be a constant topic in the paddock.

Several significant off-season developments between IMSA and its partners at the FIA and ACO, have seen even more accurate methods of data collection, in what Kurdock has characterized as a “refined process” with every top-class prototype, either LMDh or LMH-based model, having re-visited the wind tunnel, which is now shared between both the WeatherTech Championship and FIA World Endurance Championship, for re-homologations.

“The FIA, ACO and IMSA, in collaboration, have come up with a common wind tunnel process,” Kurdock tells Sportscar365 in an exclusive interview. “WEC cars were tested in Sauber (in Switzerland). IMSA cars were tested in Windshear (in North Carolina). With all cars now going through the Windshear process, there was an opportunity for us to refine some of the aerodynamic testing procedures and process.

“When we went through the wind tunnel the first time [in 2022], the [GTP/LMDh] cars hadn’t been on the race track yet, especially the first cars that went through the process. We were able to leverage years of track data to make sure that the parameters we’re using in the wind tunnel are most representative of what we would see in competition in our respective championships. There is refinement on some of the parameters based on our learnings.”