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To be fair, Joest had most of their success the past few years with Audi Sport. And Audi Sport often took a no expenses spared effort with Joest, or Champion or anyone else they valued as a factory or quasi-factory team.
Joest has been a great team, but they can't work miracles all the time. Champion became the superior team in the ALMS in late '03, and Audi of America and Audi Sport officials said that as good as Joest was, Champion was even better.
Also, it should be noted that the original Mazda DPI was heavily influenced by Bill Riley and Riley Technologies, who hadn't designed a successful full carbon tubbed car since Bill's father Bob designed the Intrepid GTP for Pratt & Miller in the early 1990s. The Cadillac LMP cars were failures until Nigel Stroud was brought in, and the situation repeated itself here. Hell, the Mazda DPI didn't even run Multimatic shocks on it until Joest and Multimatic got more involved in the program.
Basically, both Joest and Multimatic had to fix Riley's screw ups. Joest undoubtedly helped sort out the car, but let's be realistic here. Joest is good at managing races at the race track, but they're not an engineering firm.
From what I'm gathering, Joest may've wanted Mazda to switch to a different tub, like an Oreca or Ligier, anything other than the Riley tub. Mazda, who in partnership with Multimatic, didn't want to because of the investment already made to try and fix the Riley-based Mazda DPI.
Rather or not that's true, or Joest felt that Multimatic muscled them out of the fold, fact is that Joest is leaving the Mazda effort following Sebring.
Also of interest is that John Dagys at SC365 wrote an article about this saying that Joest and Mazda Motorsports are splitting up. Marshall Pruett at Racer Magazine wrote and article with the same exact info in it, but says that Joest and Mazda's partnership is continuing.
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