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And given their public statements, I doubt that the ACO will learn. Factory teams will only come in if they know that all ERS classes are equal, that you don't need a hybrid to do well, and you don't need the VAG or even TMG sized budgets. Even TMG are spending massive amounts of money compared to a privateer team.
IMO, it also doesn't look good when you had a $200 million dollar program almost lose out at LM to a LMP2 pro-am program whose budget was a very small fraction of that.
I think that the days of big budgets are over, and the days of one or two OEMs supporting the top class are probably over. Le Mans and the WEC should do what LM and the WSC and ALMS/LMS did best, which is be a good alternative for those who don't want to go into F1 or spend almost F1 levels of money.
I know that I keep harping on it, but the ALMS had prior to the LMP2 factory team explosion the best balance between factory teams, factory supported privateers and fully private teams.
Sadly, the model that the ACO have right now isn't conductive to such ideas. When you don't wanna play in LMP1 anymore, hire a pay driver or a "sneaky silver" and go LMP2 racing. Is that really what we want to see?
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