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Where teams in TCR will learn is that they need to carry their own spares and there's one place in the US to get them. In the past (when the majority of your parts were OEM) you still carried a bunch of spares but if you were short something like a control arm, the chance of a dealer or just getting it overnighted from the warehouse was easy. Plus if it's a German car, you could get lots of parts from places like SSF and they were much cheaper than the dealer.
What teams will learn is that they will have to load up on $50K in spares because they can't rely on the parts supplier to be at the track or even have the part in stock. Plus there's no discount, so everyone pays the same. TCR is just like GT4 where the manufacturers sell you the idea that they are there at the track for service and you don't need to stockpile spares. Porsche set the bar 30 years ago for a support truck and I have never seen any other manufacturer meet that level.
I'm not surprised they didn't have things like suspension parts because they are expensive to stock. Even though anyone that has raced TCR over the last few years knows that suspension damage is on the level of an open wheel car (it's not uncommon to see complete corners ripped off a car) due to no protection for a tire sticking out 6" from the actual unibody. It was like when we had the BMW in Rolex GT. Carbon fenders with the wheels sticking out 6" and thus I can't remember the amount of times we had lost the complete corner and had to retrieve it because it still had expensive good parts on it (i.e. brake caliper). Yet a GS M3, you had to hit it really hard and the chance of the corner ripping off, was pretty much non existent.
The running costs of a TCR car will be much higher than what most expect. In the end, global platform wins and the competitor pays.
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