Just interesting to look, that when IMSA was big in the '80s, GTP was running 80+ hours in a season, with, say, 16 races, and maybe 10-12 of those were 3 hours/500k or more. And GTO/GTU wasn't necessarily a huge amount less than that in terms of running time, even with divided race distances being lower for the GTs in a number of cases.
(Fuel was more expensive then in terms of mileage being worse, whether for the race cars or the transporters. I doubt motels were exactly cheaper in real terms back then, and probably less prevalent. On-the-road communication was harder, so you lost efficiency compared to today because of that. The over-the-wall pit crews have never been huge, either then or now. A GTP was up to $300,000 in 1986; what's inflation do to that? And what's the inflation-adjusted price for one of those Roush GTO-class cars? It's just interesting to compare.)
As for going forward now, I think I'd want to have a better idea of what's coming for Prototypes in 2020 first, because that could sort of reset the GT map in a number of ways, depending on the direction the rules go.
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