LMDh (DPi regulations version 2.0)

[broadrun96]

Originally Posted by chernaudi

IMO, it's still just short of Indy Car or NASCAR to me. Just buying someone else's car, putting a body kit and an engine in it doesn't make it "your car". IMO, that's the cheap and easy, minimal effort way out.

Also look at the DPI vs LMP2 mess that existed in 2017 and 2018. LMP2 teams were promised by the ACO and IMSA to have a chance to win. DPI teams didn't like spending more than LMP2 teams to be pegged back to near-identical performance levels.

We're already seeing these issues in present day LMP1, where Toyota, with an OEM developed car and powertrain, and a probable near $100 million budget, are being pegged back to privateer performance levels against teams, no matter how good they are, don't have the resources and a budget that at most is 1/10 of Toyotas.

Yeah, DPI 2.0 and LMDH is just fine for a car maker who just wants to pull what Aston Martin did in 2009-11 and just take a customer car, shoe horn their own engine in it, strap a bodykit to it, and say job done.

But to me, that's not what got me into the sport when I was a teenager. IMSA and the ACO need to go back and look at LMP900 and figure out what worked there.

How do you define worked? If you mean wins, well that DIDN'T work at all. It was Audi unless something went wrong, and as I recall it didn't last all that long did it. There weren't constructors lining up to build cars, it was ONE major and boutique builders. They ran out of money, it was expensive and crashed.

Sorry but that dream world of everyone wanting to be there never occurred. Hell Porsche didn't get involved until the end and pretty much killed off the end evolution of the rules. That wasn't the rosy time of development, it was one car, one team, one development and others trying. Panoz wasn't developing much, outside of Sparky and that was **** down quick, it was a tried and true engine in a new package. Audi did exactly what Toyota is doing now, spending more and winning unless something broke.