|
As I understood it, the original rules were supposed to be like that--choose your hybrid class, and they'd all be about equal when their advantages and disadvantages weighed in. That was until the ERS incentive came in and was clearly biased towards big hybrids. And hybrids do have to be singled out as the single biggest cost increaser, and is a big reason why, for instance, Porsche are claimed (or verified?) to have spent 280 million Euros a season on their LMP1 program, or at least the majority of that amount on it. Just a few years ago, a factory team could dominate the WEC on half that much or less.
Granted, the ACO moving away from air restrictors, narrowing up the cars and allowing some more aero freedom all contributed to the cost rise, but IMO, the biggest two are allowing so much more hybrid power, and with the rules being good for only three years originally, giving the teams a relatively short time to get there. Only Audi and Toyota having new cars last season pushed the new rules introduction back to 2018, and Audi Sport leaving exposing some of the issues with the regs and exposing the need to cut the teams some slack on costs (mostly time constraint related) lead to pushing back those rules to 2020.
Yeah, you can argue that it's the teams' fault, even Toyota's (who's budget went up significantly for 2016 and this season), but the reality is that tech and speed does cost money, especially when a rules set written to exploit it is only good for three years, as this rules set originally was.
I think that the ACO did realize that their current rules don't appeal to a broad realm of manufacturers, especially from a ROI stand point (spending boat loads of money for little media coverage outside of Le Mans), and not everyone wanted to invest huge sums of money on hybrid tech, even if every mainsteam car maker has at least one in their line up. They still don't think that 8MJ hybrids should be a requirement to be competitive.
And this seems is where Peugeot comes in, the guys who originally got the ACO to place a limit on hybrids of 3.5MJ and strict controls on how teams can harvest and deploy recovered energy. It seems that they're pushing a similar, if less restrictive, agenda. The Hybrid genie is out of the bottle, but that doesn't mean that costs can't be brought back down to more sane levels. And if the ACO resort to placing nationalistic pride as a priority, Peugeot might get what they want, which in this case might be a good thing.
But the ACO can ill afford to alienate Porsche and Toyota, who've spent quite a bit of money on their huge hybrid systems that were designed to exploit the current rules. But I think that even they'd be happy to have more than one route to go with technology, and if it saves them money, that should only help to keep them around longer.
|