Quote:
Originally Posted by FordCosworthPanoz
Let's be honest, 6 hour races aren't helping. It's hard to get viewers for races like Silverstone when essentially for 2 full hours (hours 3-5) nothing of any interest to the common viewer is happening at all. That's why I liked the old 480km (Id increase it to 500) distance used during the peak of popularity of the FIA WSCC, it was still endurance racing, but easy enough to look visually exciting and keep spectators at the circuit instead of headed to the gates or food stalls like we saw at Brazil last year. 6 Hours or 1000km should be for special races like Spa and Fuji.
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I agree and I'd support this, probably unpopular opinion on this board (?).
6 hour is simply a nightmare for tv. I can't see any mainstream channel (=Eurosport) every showing full races with this distance unless there is really empty weekend in terms of other more popular sports.
Maybe I am watching the wrong series but 6 hours of a day often feels like a burden. It's too short to be an epic like Sebring/LM/Petit but too long to create constantly more close and exciting racing. ELMS is already experimenting with shorter races, I can actually see this happening since it kind of happened during the original Championship and back then tv was much less important.
Between 198x-1992 the distances changed from season to season - before 1988 the few sprint races were 360km, 1989-1990: all races 480km, 1991: 430 km and then in 1992 back to mixed format (500km and 1000km - the original [cancelled] schedule). Seems like the were looking for the perfect distance already back then.
Btw, where does ALMS' 2h
45 min comes from? Fits more nicely to a 3 hour tv slot?