The term "balance of performance" entered mainstream motorsport vocabulary with the creation of the Group GT3 regulations in 2005, effective for the 2006 racing season. The designers of GT3 drew on lessons learned from earlier homologation-special era GT classes, where manufacturers had exploited the homologation process to build road-legal but barely street-driveable cars specifically to dominate racing. GT3 instead established a single-class framework in which a wide variety of road-legal sports cars — from Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Mercedes, BMW, and many others — could compete on equal terms, with a governing body continuously adjusting each car's power output, minimum weight, aerodynamic configuration, and engine management to equalize lap times.
The system was later adopted for other production-based categories, including Group GT4, LM GTE, and TCR Touring Cars, each adapting the core principle to their own regulations and car types.
In GT3 racing, the SRO Motorsports Group, which administers the GT World Challenge series, conducts two dedicated BoP evaluation tests each year at Circuit Paul Ricard. Series-regular drivers take each car through its paces while the cars are fitted with organizer-supplied telemetry systems so that objective performance data can be gathered. Cars that are new to the class also undergo wind-tunnel and dynamometer testing to establish a baseline.
Based on the collected data, the organizers adjust parameters that most directly control lap-time performance: engine horsepower and torque curves, minimum vehicle weight (ballast), and aerodynamic downforce levels. By cross-referencing performance patterns across multiple race weekends and test sessions, the BoP can be revised at any point in a season. Different sanctioning bodies apply their own BoP calculations even for the same cars: the ACO and IMSA historically applied different adjustments to LM GTE cars competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the IMSA WeatherTech Championship, which occasionally produced visible performance disparities when the same car competed in both.
A well-known vulnerability of the BoP system is the incentive to sandbag — deliberately underperform during testing or early race weekends in order to receive a more favorable adjustment. The Ford GT, run by Chip Ganassi Racing, attracted accusations of sandbagging during the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship season, with rival teams alleging the car was intentionally held back in tests to influence its assigned parameters ahead of the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans. IMSA responded to sandbagging concerns by instituting a rule that any car found to be underperforming during the Roar Before the 24 testing event would face a five-minute stop-and-go penalty during the race itself.
Assetto Corsa Competizione, developed by Kunos Simulazioni as the official GT World Challenge simulation, implements BoP as part of its core simulation fidelity. The game replicates the real-world GT3 BoP values for its car roster, which spans the major GT3-class manufacturers. Server operators running official or community races can enforce BoP settings, meaning the game software automatically adjusts each car's performance characteristics to match current real-world parity targets.
This design means that the relative performance hierarchy in ACC mirrors what teams experience at actual circuit events, and that updates to real-world BoP regulations are reflected in game patches over time. For competitive ACC leagues and esports events, BoP enforcement is standard, and drivers select their car knowing the grid is intentionally equalized rather than picking whatever model offers the largest raw performance advantage.
The TCR touring car category applies a variation on standard BoP called compensation weight. In this system, cars that achieve strong results accumulate additional ballast in subsequent events, making the car heavier and therefore slower, until performance is re-equalized. The Japanese Super GT series uses a conceptually similar mechanism called success ballast that applies only to vehicle weight. These systems share the same underlying goal as full BoP — preventing a single model from dominating — but operate through a simpler, result-linked weight adjustment rather than multi-parameter testing analysis.