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Originally Posted by EffectiveSprinkles
What does 'Euro' have to do with anything? WEC is a WORLD championship. ELMS is the European only one.
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Not sure if you're joking or what, but every single team in WEC is run out of Europe. Even the ones registered elsewhere are still run from Europe. Whether it's a world championship or not, Maelochs is talking about European teams coming over the associated costs, and building rules for a European market.
I agree with Maelochs on the whole lot except this little bit:
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One thing IMSA seems to have learned is that it needs to design its series to its own needs—FIA/ACO is quite happy to kneecap the North American series to make its headline Euro race and series work to its own imagined best plan.
I’d love to see some of the P1 privateers head over, but IMSA cannot design its rules based on the hope that some teams which probably don’t see much RoI in crossing the Atlantic anyway, will spend huge dollars to ither travel or to set up another branch of the team.
On the other hand, if IMSA changes the rules to make the series more attractive to Euro teams, and they don’t come … what would the fallout be at home?
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I 100% agree that IMSA should design its rules to suit the competitors it has, and the most likely potential competitors that it will have in the future.
However, I also think the ACO should do the exact same. But whenever the ACO makes its own rules, we quickly get told they're ignoring IMSA, or knee capping IMSA and what not.
There's a bit of double standards going on there. IMSA teams are not the WECs market, so the ACO should not be designing rules for IMSA teams. They should design the rules for what works best for them. That isn't sticking the finger up to IMSA - that's doing what's best for themselves. Likewise, IMSA not using the LMP1 regulations isn't sticking a finger up at the ACO - it's doing what's best for themselves.
If it's the right thing for IMSA to do what's right by their customers, then we should be using the same yardstick to judge the ACOs actions. The ACO aren't always the cleanest when it comes to moral decisions, but in this case they're doing nothing wrong.
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For combined Prototype classes, I really don't think it's such a magical fix all that we'd all like it to be. Right now, DPi is cheap, and the US is a huge market for Toyota. Yet there isn't a Toyota DPi? Why? BMW want hydrogen prototypes - are we going to get that in IMSA?
Meanwhile, the GTE and GTLM regulations are near enough identical, and Corvette still say it isn't worth going to WEC. So even with the same car, they can't do it. Are we going to get a Cadillac over in Europe? They're even less common than Corvettes. An Acura? Not likely - they weren't popular even when they were LMP2s and the only ones that appeared are customers. Mazda? They didn't run the LMP2 over here either.
We've been there with ALMS and apart from Audi, there was no major movement between the continents, even with compatible rules. So I really don't see it achieving anything in that regard.
IMSA should continue what it's doing - it works incredibly well for them. ACO should continue listening to their customers. It's different markets and they have different aims. What I would love to see is a DPi invitational class at Le Mans though. Since non-WEC cars aren't scored at Le Mans for points, it'd make no difference.