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Old 14 Nov 2017, 22:07 (Ref:3780474)   #5242
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Originally Posted by Speed-King View Post
Look at it the other way around - would Joest and especially Penske bother if there wasn't serious money in those projects?

I'm not suggesting anything insane, but I don't think it's too different from what they had to work with for their ALMS campaigns. Sure, there is no need for megabucks R&D-programs, but if we look at the pure running costs we probably aren't too far away from anything we've seen in the latter R8 years in ALMS once there was no true factory competition.
Well for Joest we knew for sure they wanted to get back to something prototype-ish after Audi dumped LMP1, and from very early on they started mentioning NA (the other rumor was maybe running privateer R18 but obviously that never materialized). For them it may just well be running something moderately well known in the sportscar circles, just to keep in the business, so maybe their price tag for Mazda wasn't that expensive.

But moreover as I allured earlier, if Mazda really paid almost nothing for the IMSA Speedsource program (proven especially for how long they dragged along those ancient Lolas), why would they suddenly want to make such a big budget jump now? I mean sure they finally needed a new team to replace that terrible Rocketsports-esque band of fools running things, but I highly doubt the budget itself was skyrocketed all of a sudden. They know just as everyone else that these are performance balanced spec cars, and the only things that really matter are A) engine reliability B) caution lottery C) personnel running the vehicles.

As for Penske, again he's been saying for years he wants to go back to sportscars. In fact there have been rumors from time and time again that he'd like to do LMP1, not only at Le Mans (as it's top class) but also NA. But as there's nothing else but "DPi" now - which is what you want instead of barebody LMP2 because of some additional sponsorship and also OEM BoP bargaining tool - he sticks to that now.

It's somewhat difficult to draw comparisons to old ALMS as the economic situations were so different back then, but I guess that's fair

Anyway I don't follow IMSA anymore so I don't really know all the newer details really
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