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Originally Posted by Richard Casto
Who pays for this? Clearly there is the budget of the day to day operations of the team, etc. But if (as that article mentions) includes a potential customer version of the diesel engine (sans hybrid), there will clearly be some development required to package it for the non-hybrid class or at the minimum coordinate with whoever would take up the challenge. Someone would have to pay for that. Is Audi now going to fund a diesel engine program for LMP1? I can't see that given to a degree that they are both moving away from diesel AND the PR effort of "we are stopping this to save money" due to the emissions fiasco.
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You're overcomplicating this. If Audi is going to help then you just run the car with the hybrid system as is. They already said they're not going to fire anyone, I'm sure they can find some engineers with nothing better to do than keep the power units running. The only difficult part is air lifting batteries around the world.
Similarly if you look at the Joest end, they don't exactly have the resources of a typical privateer team and are looking for ways to keep the team employed. Since it's no longer a factory team any potential sponsors will get a much larger role than they could playing second fiddle to the Audi branding at a much lower dollar number.