Paul Di Resta has criticised the way the Balance of Performance is being implemented in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship after the Ligier LMP2 he was racing during the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring was no match to those running DPi machinery.
The Scotsman, racing alongside Phil Hanson and Alex Brundle at United Autosports, finished on the lead lap at the Sebring International Raceway, but felt the DPi machines were running at a different level throughout the race, and something needs to be done to solve this, particularly if the championship wants to entice more European outfits to their endurance events.
“Overall a satisfying result – fifth, and on the lead lap, is a decent result taking into account that currently it is totally impossible to race against the DPi cars,” said Di Resta.
“The Balance of Performance is an embarrassing waste of time – IMSA must get it sorted if they want teams from Europe to head here.”
Co-driver Hanson, who put in some strong stints of his own to keep the car in contention, agreed with Di Resta that the performance differences between the LMP2 machines and the DPi’s was ‘huge’.
“Our car had really strong pace today for much of the race,” said Hanson. “I managed to keep things clean in both of my double stints and increased the gap over the other LMP2s despite a couple of small issues.
“My only frustration is the huge divide between the performance of the DPi and LMP2 cars.”
Third driver Brundle, who only came into the team late on to replace the ill Bruno Senna, enjoyed his own performance at Sebring despite a quick spin, and it was just a matter of making no further mistakes in his final stint to ensure the car was in contention until the very end.
“The first three and a half stints I did were really nice on pace,” said Brundle. “The car was handling beautifully and it was good to finish up in touch with the leaders and crucially on the lead lap.
“I spun when I had to jink across to the inside of the track down the back straight under FCY when overtaking the GTs after a Merc pulled out from the ‘train’.
“In my final stint we were still in the hunt so I just concentrated on making no mistakes to hand over to Paul to bring it home to the flag.”
