Quote:
Originally Posted by Akrapovic
Well, not sure the Riley quality is really up there, or if it's any more interesting than the rest of the LMP2 field. It's almost certainly not as good a car, and no offense to BAR1, but they may not match the top ELMS teams (yet). So I can see good reason for it not getting in.
You'll get no argument from me about the manufacturer restriction. It sucks. But if you have 3 good ones and lemon, it's not necessarily fair to give the lemon an entry just because it exists, whilst others achieve more.
Should just drop the restriction for the next generation. But we all know that anyway.
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The new performance allowances for non-Orecas will artificially close the gap for this year, plus unlike Dallara and Onroak who will only be permitted to have aero dev, Riley will also be allowed to upgrade the chassis itself.
But even if they really don't make that much of a difference, it's not really the "build quality" of the Riley as per say, but just that it is the fourth officially recognized spec brand and therefore has more "brand quality" than another clone Oreca or GTE-AM. It's kind of a PR question for ACO as well to have them there, even if they were 20 seconds slower than everyone else it still looks better to have them there than not
In the olden days of non capping, sure you could leave Norma or Radical or whatever to the reserve list or plain deny them altogether, but back then it wasn't as much of a humiliation for the organizer to have low chassis variety as the market was wide open, not created to be that way. Plus LMP1 used to be healthier so the focus wasn't as much in the lower class