Quote:
Originally Posted by helgi
I think this format is so popular because manufacturers are afraid of direct comparison. It's marketing fault. I sound paranoiac but for me it's obvious. Advertising used to be more clever and way more classy. Today they are so unconfident with their cars that can not live without BoP. All that nonsense about cost saving is vanished totally by spendings in GT3 alone. I would be surprised if TCR is cheaper than S2000.
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Three reasons attribute to it
1) Marketing as you presented, as well as coming up with hokey reasonings for cars having these classy tech properties - the best phrase is
"technology transfer from road car" - that supposedly helped them to win the competition. These reasons can be anything, like "superior fuel consumption", when no-one mentions the latest adjusted size of the fuel tank and latest adjusted size of fuel flow restrictors. And the sad thing is, you think most people just wouldn't know better when they nod when hearing these claims, but really it seems to me like they don't even care.
2) The easiness of just turning up with whatever and expectation of the series to take care of speeding up and development. Now obviously many manufacturers, Germans especially, still burn money in the oven regardless, and don't really support the cost cutting theory, as you said. But for the most part you can play cheap penny and expect to win (or tell your chassis customers to to expect to win) with zero effort at least once or twice during a season.
3) Every other series/class is also doing it so why would anyone bother with the "dated old world" concept anymore, if the ROI is the same or even better (see reasons 1 and 2). It's the same argument used for pro-am racing, it's hard to go back to what there was once you have over saturated the market. FIA GT3 and FIA GT4 grew relatively slowly in it's first two or three years because no other series in the world, save perhaps Grad-Am and to some extent old FIA GT (although up there the cars at least were originally built for real regulations and were used as such in ACO racing), was really utilizing the same system. But along the way, GTE in 2010-2011 and so on, everyone started adopting the same model. The last few non-spec categories which had retained technical regulations, such as LMP1, finally also had to started to hear lobbyism cries from OEMs wanting to get piece of the pie their way, the only way, and they gave up.
Speaking of which here's the latest series to join the 'fun'. DTM's had handicaps systems in use of course in addition to more spec chassis, but this sounds like officially becoming full bop series now too
https://www.autosport.com/dtm/news/1...or-2021-season
A system of Balance of Performance (BoP) is also expected to be used, despite ITR chairman Gerhard Berger's dislike for the concept. "It's clear that we'll have to extend our technical regulations and it's also obvious that this extension will go in the direction of GT Plus regulations," Berger told Autosport. "To further develop the platform in this direction was our plan even before Audi's withdrawal. -- Audi has previously stated that its customer teams could compete in the DTM following its exit after 2020, should the series adopt cars based on the GT3 formula.