Is it a sport?

[Félix]

(my first post in a loooooong time. I'm still following the sport; it's just not what it felt like 15 years ago when I was much younger and the world was different. Double-posted on the Mulsannes Corner FB page: I'm interested in what the community here thinks.)

For more than 10 years now, I've been struggling with the fact that what I/we love to follow is called motorsports. Sport. SPORT? Equivalency rules are always political.

-This year, LMP2 cars should have monopolised the podium - if the ACO hadn't made their fuel tank so comically small. Give them 90 or 100 liters like older LMP cars, GT cars and big road cars and a P1H couldn't have afforded to lose more than 20-30 minutes.
-The diesel equivalency was so far off, it could have been comical... if the way Pescarolo and others got royally screwed hadn't made me so angry. Can anyone tell me exactly how many times diesels had to be reined in from 2006 to 2013? I'm not the only one who noticed the class went from 25+ potentially front-running efforts to less than 5 during that time, right? There used to be half a dozen chassis manufacturers who would try their hand at the class; they've turned into efforts that eventually die because they can't realistically win, vaporware projects (Oreca 02 Peugeot, Epsilon Euskadi ee2, Wirth-HPD giant-killer, etc) and now appointed-manufacturer semi-spec second divisions.
-I understand part of it is just the nature of the sport: the manufacturers' engines are well developed and they always end up with big displacement, turbos and now electricity that just give them a huge torque advantage over the privateers' engines. Torque wins races. With the current GTE engine BOP, we're seeing how it should have been in an "equal" world now: since only manufacturers are involved, they go as far as neutering turbo engines so they tune down the bigger engines to match the smaller Porsche's torque curve. And even then, the better engines have more leeway for fuel economy and they break less often. The DPi equivalency is trying to get to the same point with the Gibson as a baseline, but I don't think it's even possible to adjust down the Cadillac V8's torque down; arguably, going that far to maintain a level playing field would be plain stupid...

But if it were really a sport, the cars would have to be completely equal and only the best would win. Unfortunately, our sport has a huge turnover where 80+% of the teams come and disappear completely over any given 5-year period. The ones who keep the sport going are rich dudes who want their very own class or BOP adjustment so they can get their podium - not the best athletes.

So Porsche appears to be leaving. I just hope the ACO manages to balance its classes so that more than one type of entrant can realistically win races. So that it feels like a sport where the result isn't predictable and influenced by politics. But there's always gonna be lots of politics involved...