2024 24 Hours of Daytona

Do people watch the whole thing?

when i think of daytona i think of nascar and daytona 500. i never heard of none of this.

There's going to be a lot of different manufacturers, especially in the GT classes, including a new Ford Mustang GT3 and I'm looking forward to seeing it run.

i dont get how it fair to have clearly different cars that are clearly unequal compete together.

Even if I was a fan of racing I don't know who has the patience for this.

The race starts tomorrow. I'm hoping to find a place to stream it. Hopefully this will work for me:

www.imsa.com/tvlive/

I mentioned before that I was interested in the new Mustang GT race car. It looks like they feel to be hit hardest by Balance of Performance.

www.motorsport.com/imsa/news/ford-mustang-hopes-hit-imsa-debut-daytona-rockenfeller/10569188/

This ad is from 2011. It talks about Chevy wanting to run Corvette against Ferrari, Porsche, and the like, but it had too much horsepower and had to cut it back a bunch "just to be fair." It was deliberately dishonest advertising. Technically, if you break up everything they say into individual nuggets of information, they're all factually true. However, they present it in a way that suggests something untrue.

Clearly it implies Ferrari and company can't produce the kind of immense power found in the Corvette so Chevy had to cut power to be fair to the slower cars. This is a heap of lies. The other guys were more than capable of more power, too. Ferrari, for example, at that moment had three models of cars available at the time, and they were more powerful. That's not taking into account race cars, where Ferrari had long since produced over a thousand horses. Racing in ALMS, you race in race versions of cars, not production cars with a roll cage, meaning they're actual race cars and the competition already had produced more powerful race cars, so of course they could do it against Corvettes.

Everyone, not just the Corvettes, were limited on how much power they were allowed to have, and those limits weren't based on what this or that manufacturer could do. Series organizers determine class restrictions for every class with disregard for who is capable of what. I can't think of any racing series that doesn't do this. "Just to be fair" is race restrictions keeping Ferrari from taking 1,200 horsepower against a Corvette with half of that. Without restrictions, Ferrari could take an F1 car against a Corvette and lap it every three laps.

The same thing is happening to the Mustang here, more or less. It's not simply about limits on power, displacement, or whatever. The problem with having widely varying car models of very different sizes, shapes, engines, weight distributions, downforce, et cetera is keeping them close enough that there's still competition and entertainment for fans. That means trying to gauge general performance of the different models and finding ways of bringing them closer together. A quick, easy way of doing that is making faster ones add ballast.