Quote:
Originally Posted by BrentJackson
People are a little hard on IMSA here with regards to rules stability. The main reason for the desires to keep the cars as development-limited as possible is not NASCAR or a desire to be like them, but rather sports car racing in North America has a rather limited fanbase and racing's economic in North America in general suck terribly - NASCAR is starting to suffer, Indycar is in a deep hole, the ALMS was bought out so that it wouldn't go broke. America's economics right now don't make finding sponsorship for racing easy, and for a fairly high-cost series trying to get sponsors right now is really hard, even for the cheaper pro-am classes.
I would dare say that if the teams could work with budgets like they could once get, they would. If they had the funds to be able to engage in lots of development, I'm sure most of the teams would. But its just not on the cards, so its better to keep the racing as close as possible, hence fairly restrictive rules.
|
The economics of Gen 3.5 DP are awful. It's a class with (in the entire world) 5 regular cars, 4 from one manufacturer and 3 from one circle of partners that own most of the business behind the class and series.
There's no stability and there's no cost savings. Half the teams in the class in 2013 dumped their program and bought another car they could afford to race because it cost more money to upgrade one DP than buy two LMPCs, all it did was force some people to buy more parts from the series to keep their manufacturer support. Meanwhile Ganassi was throwing money down a bottomless hole to get that turbo to work too, so so much for not spending money on development.
You'd think with all the complaining about the ACO and ORECA being in bed somebody might care the entire DP format serves pretty much entirely Jim France's own interests. They got sped up so he could still win his own races with his own car, it ruined the class for everyone else and pushed budgets up to where they're probably around the bottom of P1 where Muscle Milk and Dyson were sitting lately.