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Well, Adam, you're as good at it as I am a lousy typist, and believe me, I'm horrible at typing.
Anyways, fresh point to ponder. If LMP1 is kinda blown wide open as far as private teams having a shot at overall wins at LM and elsewhere in the WEC as soon as next season (even if Toyota is around, I'd bet that the ACO would want to do something to at least make the sprint races more interesting), could that lead to a customer car "explosion"?
LMP1 hasn't really had a healthy customer car market for years. And I don't mean someone selling year old or even current spec factory cars to a privateer team.
Back in the late '90s and early '00s we had Lola, Courage and others designing and selling cars. We then had Reynard come in (who's 02S LMP675 IP was sold to Zytek/Gibson) with a car, which also lead to Zytek and Creation coming in.
First generation LMP1 had many of those same players for a while, too, as well as Lister (originally a LMP900 car that became a LMP1). Even when Courage was bought out by Oreca, we still had them around for a while.
But the customer car market in LMP1 collapsed as costs went up and it started to become a factory team playground. I think with diminishing interest in the current LMP1 package by manufacturer teams, it would hopefully raise up and opportunity for guys to provide customer cars.
We already have Ginetta with a design, as well as Dallara with SMP Racing. Who else could be joining or would we want to join? Could maybe Multimatic, who own most of the Lola Cars IP be willing to do something? Like Reynard in 2000 who laid a rotten egg with the original 2KQ (which did become a decent customer car eventually), I think that Multmatic might have a point to prove after the failure of the Riley Mk30 LMP2 car.
Granted, they already have the Mazda DPI program they can use to redeem themselves, but could they make a LMP1 chassis for a customer? Remember that LMP1 and LMP2 tubs are built to the same crash testing standards and technical regs.
Oreca have even admitted that they might look at offering up a LMP1 spec version of the 07 (or maybe something else) if they're enough demand.
Could we see the rise of the customer car to the 2000's levels again? Or is thinking that way too far fetched?
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