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There's a little bit of difference between just slapping a sticker on a car and selling customer engines to all comers who ask for them if you can ship them to your customers, vs what IMSA is trying to do.
And what IMSA is trying to do is allow (and, in fact, actively encourage) OEMs to design body kits for their cars (which, granted are subject to BOP), and other things that are just more than simply putting decals on a car built by someone else as a branding exercise, or selling engines.
No to mention the "target demographics" of ACO LMP2 vs IMSA DPI, one being a true privateer category with no or minimal direct factory involvement, vs one that's biased to being an all-professional category with overt factory assistance.
It's not Audi Sport, Porsche Motorsport, or Toyota Motorsport GmbH level, but it's still more than what's supposed to be in a private class. The relatively large amount of spending that Porsche and Acura/HPD did on their LMP2 programs in the mid-late 2000's is what drove this whole thing to begin with for the ACO.
In the end, I see this as a bunch of egos on both sides jockeying for power and prestige and we're also talking a rivalry between Jim France and the ACO that goes back to 1997 when IMSA adopted ACO/FIA regs for prototypes and GT1 cars instead of keeping IMSA as it was from 1993-97.
I had the feeling that from the start, things weren't gonna end well considering that the France family/NASCAR/ISC and the ACO never got along back then, and it seems that things haven't changed since 2013, either. There's fault on both sides in this rivalry that seems to have tainted the global LMP2 plans.
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