[Purist]

Zytek Engineering might like Corsa to continue work on the hybrid, but Corsa is NOT the works team, and Corsa has to do what they believe is in their best interests. Seeing as how they have had horrid vibration problems that they could not solve with the hybrid system operational, that said system is added weight over the minimum, and that said system is robbing horsepower from the internal combustion engine (rather than providing additional power of its own), Corsa sees that they are NOT making progress down that path. More importantly, they are making little if any progress with a system that, by mere virtue of it being on the car whether it works or not, is significantly hurting them competitively on the race track.

Now for the main topic at hand.

I do think two GT classes, especially if they were based on displacement, wouldn't be a bad idea. In LMPs and GTs though, it's not a bad thing to have a less hell-bent-for-leather class so that the factories don't drive everyone off when they do show up. And I didn't find the multi-class aspect, even between different GTs or P cars, to be confusing, frustrating, or a problem at all when I saw my first ALMS race on TV (and that was the first sportscar race I could ever remember having seen, so up until Sears Point 1999, multi-class racing of any kind was completely foreign to me).

I don't think manufacturers merging has been an issue as much as manufacturers just not deciding to go sportscar racing. And among those who do, most of them don't really provide much volume in terms of customer cars. Except for Porsche and Ferrari to an extent, I think this issue really began to rear its head when sponsors were finally allowed to adorn the cars themselves (the FIA ban on this practice was lifted after 1968).

It's funny, but I don't think the absolute car counts say nearly as much as you might think in some critical ways. Watching the ALMS race coverage from 1999-2000, there might as well have been 6 prototypes and 4 GTs at any given race for all the airtime any of the other cars got. You saw the Panoz, BMWs, and Audis. Occasionally, you were reminded of the existence of the R&Ss, Lolas, Ferraris, and the lone Porsche 911 GT1. In GTS/GT, you saw the Beretta/Wendlinger Viper, the Snow Porsche 911 GT2, the Dick Barbour Porsche, and the leading PTG BMW M3. You generally only saw flashes of the second Viper, the Corvette, or any of the other GT class cars.

All that aside, most of those early fields of cars were made up of WSCs (NOT actual LMP900s), and old-spec GT3s (Porsche 911s that looked little removed from their counterparts of the '70s and the very boxy, early PTG BMW M3s). What I'm saying is that if you look at the grids based on the actual current regulation cars that were running, it really hasn't been a decline when you realize that 1999-2000 you effectively had two separate generations of cars on track at once, rather than just one. Aside from Daytona and Sebring, the late IMSA, PSCR, and USRRC grids weren't looking all that hot in terms of numbers in the WSC era (1994-98). And lest we forget that the first PLM had but 29 starters. With 1999, there was the switchover to LMP900, GTS, and GT. There was a smaller change with real LMP675s coming out for customers in 2002. In 2005, we had the move to LMP1, LMP2, GT1, and GT2.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but my brain was running, and my hands were just trying to keep up. Good night.