This describes briefly how
the races are held. First, a race can be either 3,6,12 or 24 hours. Back when
there was a yearly championship going, there was a fixed schedule of races. Now
a race event is based on people deciding that it would be nice to have a race
this coming week-end ....... and there it goes.
I guess the exception is the 24 hours race, which is held religiously every
year, one week after the 24 hours of Le Mans.
Races are usually held on
Saturdays, and finishing on Sunday for the 24 hour race. Friday nights and
Saturday mornings are for warm-up and time trials. For each race, there are two
time trial sessions. A session consists of 5 minutes per team on each of the 4
tracks. Only the best lap of each team for both sessions combined is accounted
for. Then these times are averaged and this decides the pole position. The pole
sitter gets to choose which track he will start the race on. Every team spends
the same amount of time on every of the 4 tracks during a race (e.g. 6 hours
rotation per track in a 24 hours race), so picking the track rotation is
actually fairly important strategically, since tracks 2 and 3 (the inner two
tracks) are much faster than tracks 1 and 4 (the outer two tracks).
There are a bunch of
additional rules for the races, here are just a few. For night races, the cars
must be rigged with operational front and back lights (usually white and red
LEDs). The race is not interrupted for any reason except a power supply failure
or short circuit on one of the tracks or failure from one of the electronic
devices such as counter, computer, or gas pedal. There is no limit on the
number of tire sets and contact sets, however, the engine, nor the body can be
changed, they can only be repaired.
That’s it for some of the
rules and specific of the race. Now you can check what happened at the 1996 24 hours race. And you can view a
summary table of all the results of the annual 24 hrs race since 1989.
