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I feel pretty confident in saying that Audi and Peugeot are not spending $100+ million on their LMP1 efforts because of the awesome TV ratings the ILMC and the LMS before that got. The reason why companies want to spend money on this type of racing is because the technology gets talked about a lot by non-TV automotive media. Automotive forums, blogs, magazines, and so forth. It's a captive audience. You see a lot more coverage of sports cars on those forms of media than you will of Indycar or any other form of racing that has totally forgotten that TV watching housewives aren't the only potential demographic.
I read some other forums that have nothing to do with racing or cars even and I see Audi LMP1 diesels being discussed quite often whenever there is a discussion about someone considering a fuel efficient grocery getter and so forth. Peugeot would probably be mentioned too, but this is the US so Peugeot isn't so well known anymore. The people talking about the R10/R15/R18s aren't racing fans and they probably have never seen an ILMC race on TV or in person, but they have probably read about the technology somewhere. So, yeah, that's what makes this kind of racing special.
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