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So ... I hear there is a thread about actual automobile racing, and specifically about the oldest North American endurance race? That sounds pretty exciting to me.
I have to say, rain and all I enjoyed Sebring more this year than any since the merger .... by far. Even when it looked like AXR would sweep, I didn't care because they raced their way to the front. GTLM is always GTLM, it is the one thing that has worked right for this entire century, and GTD was about as good as GTLM. Even PC managed a cliff-hanger finish of sorts.
Yes I know everything we see on track is entirely the result of BOP .... but given what we are given, once things were underway they weren't blatantly manipulated ... i didn't see any spurious cautions (unless teams are getting paid to stall or crash at series-determined moments, but that it a bit too tinfoil-hat for me.)
Derani's late charge was a huge bonus, but even if he hadn't succeeded, there were 11 hours, 55 minutes of racing before (well ... 8 hours, 55 minutes or whatever) which were all good racing.
The simple thrill of seeing which car is gaining or losing minutely to its competitors each time around doesn't go away because of changed restrictor sizes ... the cars all sound awesome regardless of whether they were given success-ballast.
We look back on the Puegeot-Audi days as some kind of golden age, but back then we were all complaining about how the diesels had bought FIA and made the rules suit them ... there has Always been politics in every human endeavor.
Scott Atherton realized (I think) that there has to be a balance between pure competition (expensive and messy and hard to sell) and pure entertainment (not what the sports car crowd is looking for.) it strikes me that IMSA has refined the balance pretty well.
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