Liqui Moly Bathurst 12hr Analysis

Photo Peter Leung.

NISMO took the win in the Am classed GT-R GT3 or Godzilla as it’s known in Australia, beating the mighty M-Sport Bentley, Phoenix Audi R8 LMS-Ultra and the Craft Bamboo Aston Martin Vantage, an extremely exciting finish to a 12hr race, I’m sure you’ll agree. Top 4 cars remained on the lead lap with minutes left of the race, so exciting in-fact I thought John Hindhaugh (commentator from Radio Le Mans) was going to keel over with excitement, thankfully he didn’t.

As far as data analysis goes, there really wasn’t too much to shout about, however I looked at the main talking point of the race and analysed the safety car data. I’ll be taking a look at the best strategy to adopt when faced with a stop-start race, and what the teams have to do, for the best chance to win the race, I liken it to a NASCAR strategy, more on this later.

 As you can see I have prepared a few tables to show some facts from the race. In the first table on the right, you can see each individual occasion of a safety cars, how many laps and for how long, there were 20 safety car in total. The longest period of yellow was for 8 laps and lasted for 34 minutes in total. I think this occasion was for the MARC Mazda 3 that crashed quite heavily at the top of the mountain. The shortest period of yellow was for the final one for the #4 Porsche spun and got it’s self stuck in the gravel, great job by the marshals to clear giving us a grandstand finish.

 The next table I have prepared shows a few things, total laps under the SC, average length in laps per SC. An average length of SC was just under 4 laps, if I’m honest that quite a good number considering the amount of incidents and the fact that some cars had some quite big impacts. Total time under SC doesn’t look so great on first impressions, 319 minutes (5 and a half hours)  spend following a lovely Mercedes S class AMG around the great Mount Panorama. Ironically if the safety car driver remained constant, they he/she would have broken the max driving time regulation of 4hr 30min. This then brings me onto my final table of race stats. If the safety car completed 5 and a half hours of the race where would it of finished if it actually entered.

The quite surprising thing was the SC car completed 27% (73 laps) of the race distance an equivalent to a 47th position finish, it’s no coincidence then that the race was behind the SC the same amount of percent. While all this was going on the race was not at full speed, no record distance this year, unfortunately the 2015 Liqui Moli Bathurst 12hr did set one record, for the most amount of laps and occasions for the safety car. The reason I mentioned early comparing the strategy adopted for the Bathurst 12hr was similar to NASCAR, is quite simple when you think about it. It’s all about staying on the lead lap, for the final sprint to the finish, if a team drops a lap it becomes very difficult but not impossible to gain it back, no wave-by here. Some final stats we can see relate to finishers, 16 cars did’t finish the race which equated to 32% of the field, a fairly high attrition rate, but thats the mountain.

Some people reading this may be thinking, all that time wasted behind a safety car, what can be done to get more green flag running. Well, I’m going to say this, for those of you who say code 60, I’m not so sure. For many of the incidents an intervention vehicle had to use the track to get to the incident and back, I’d be a bit nervous about having both on the track at the same time without a safety car. I’d also assume access roads around the track are a limiting factor too other wise they would have used them. I also noted that most of the incidents not all happened as a result of, lack of concentration and not collisions with other car, so there should be no blame at the slower car (lower classed car), on the whole they raced together well. I for one want to congratulate the marshals and race control for turning around an  incident with relative speed.

 So the future of Bathurst 12hrs will have safety cars, it’s just the nature of the circuit, a bit like Monaco, however it generally leaves us with an all-out fight for first place time and time again.

James Foster

All the data came from notes I made during the event using my race tracker template, available to download for FREE in the downloads section of this site.