By Adam Tate, Managing Editor
Every team running the new Lamborghini Huracan GT3’s in IMSA’s WeatherTech Sports Car Championship has been penalized for violating the Balance of Performance, or BoP rules in last months Rolex 24 at Daytona.
The ruling comes as little surprise after the cars clearly outperformed their rivals in the GTD class, with lap times and top speeds so much better that competitors in other classes of the event even took notice.
The advantage they held during the race turned out to be enormous; after pouring over the data, the fastest GTD lap of the race belonged to the No. 11 O’Gara Motorsport Huracan which lapped over 1.3 seconds faster than the class winning Audi R8 LMS of Magnus Racing. Imagine multiplying such an advantage over a 24 hour race and how egregious an error the cheat becomes is huge.
Many competitors had lobbied IMSA to readjust its’ Bop for the class before the race ever began, but the series didn’t and they paid they price for it.
To IMSA’s credit, in post race scrutineering they confiscated all the Lamborghini engines for further inspection. Once dyno’d, the power advantage was obvious and the results were traced to an older, unapproved Audi spec air restrictor, supplied to the teams directly from Lamborghini.
Lamborghini was issued a $25,000 fine and all 5 Huracans in the race have been handed 5 minute time penalties which have dropped them significantly down the results. Lamborghini was also docked points in the WeatherTech Championship and the Tequila Patron North American Endurance Cup.
Image: IMSA
