The ongoing pursuit of establishing parity between P2s and DPs has become a story of its own during the inaugural season of the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship. It’s a topic that has become tiresome, at best, as aging prototype designs struggle to race in an equal manner, yet with the latest Balance of Performance changes implemented by IMSA, the performance disparity could be significantly reduced.

This weekend’s event at Circuit of The Americas will feature two P2 cars that could answer questions about the current BoP state and what Prototype teams might expect to see next season as IMSA gathers information from Extreme Speed Motorsports’ HPD ARX-03b (at bottom, ABOVE) and the Ligier JS P2 (pictured, top) entered by Oak Racing.

The open-top HPD and closed-top Ligier use the same twin-turbo V6 Honda powerplant, which presents a unique opportunity for the series to baseline the performance differences between the designs on identical tires supplied by Continental.

Compared to open-top P2s, the aerodynamic gains with the Ligier coupe alone could reduce some of the gap to the more powerful DPs, and through their data collection efforts, IMSA will be able to gauge where the Ligier and upcoming coupes like HPD’s ARX-04b and ORECA’s 05 chassis will fit among the proven DPs.

“It’s precisely this question that we’re hoping to answer positively this weekend,” Oak Racing team principal Jacques Nicolet told RACER.

Amid the practices and racing that takes place, IMSA will be getting a lot of homework done ahead of 2015. In the short term, IMSA will also get a good look at how the latest BoP for the ARX-03b, which has received a healthy bump in horsepower and a matching increase in weight, will alter its performance against the DPs once the race begins. The Honda-powered JS P2 will race at the same minimum weight and power level as the open-top HPD, giving IMSA another stream of information to digest.

“We have some data from Ligier when it ran at Le Mans (LEFT), and we know right where the current HPD is, so it will be good to have both cars at COTA to take a deeper dive,” said Scot Elkins, IMSA’s Managing Director of Technical Regulations. “We’ve got data on the engine already, and the biggest thing for this is with them moving to the HPD, it was able to accept a bigger restrictor than the Nissan engine, so we could increase the power and the weight and hopefully improve the raceability.

“By boosting the horsepower, we increase the top speed, and by increasing the weight, we make them not as dominant through the twisty bits. It’s more of a DP/P2 balance thing than anything else, and we’re hopeful it will bring the cars closer together in the areas where continuing to work on.”

It’s too early to say how many new P2 coupes will race in the TUDOR Championship next year, and in preparation for whatever’s ahead, Elkins will continue IMSA’s fact-finding efforts in the wind tunnel during the off-season.

“We’re going to work on it over the winter, and it’s hard to say at this point, but it almost looks like we won’t have any open-top P2s next year,” he continued. “We may only have the closed-tops, so that will probably help what we’re working on for next year. The main thing to remember is we’ll have a different (low-downforce) spec at Daytona than what they have at COTA, for example, and that’s something we need to prepare for.”

IMSA’s work will also include testing the updated Corvette DP bodywork RACER chronicled in August [click here for story].

“The other big thing is the Corvette guys want to do a body update from the C6 to the C7 style, and it’s actually a minor change, but it will require us to go back to the wind tunnel before we go racing again in January,” Elkins noted. “It’s not going to necessarily add to what we had been planning to do, but it’s another task to handle. It’s a validation test instead of a full-on development.”