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Originally Posted by Speed-King
I'm agreeing with most of what you have written, but I'm not sure if it's fair to cast Hughes de Chaunac as the villain here. We have to take this with a grain of salt, but according to one interview, Oreca actually needed the cap on the number of manufacturers to be able to sell enough cars to not operate at a loss. So it's not so much about greedily increasing already large profits, but - absent cash-rich benefactors as in the case of SMP - about keeping the company in the prototype business at all. Now, as I mentioned already, I probably wouldn't take de Chaunac's word alone for it, but the fact that many prototype constructors went out of business or ceased building prototypes long before the advent of any constructor caps, e.g. Pilbeam, Lola, Tamboli, Radical, really shows that not all was well with the finances of these companies when the market was still open to all comers.
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I have such hard time believing Oreca would have been operating with loss in terms of 05 and O3R supply in 2015-2016, but even if that miraculously was the case, their supplementary "bonus income" coming out of LMP3 and LMPC, all effectively orchestrated with the ACO, would surely have compensated.
Now, the other argument here is that the cost cap of Spec-2017 LMP2 actually went up. The old regs had max cap of 370,000 (open top) or 450,000 (coupe), but the spec cars had cap of 483,000 euros. Yet everything was advertised the other way by Hughes.
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This is also an aspect I don't really see as a problem... Being able to badge specialist-built cars has been around for a long time. Cf. the various MG-Lolas or "Chrysler" LMP1s from around the turn of the century.
Finally, I think that you are ignoring the role that customers, i.e. teams and drivers play in this. Presented with the option of guaranteed competitiveness through BoP and mandatory Pro/Am classes in other series, there is very little incentive for them to shell out for a car or a drive in an ACO series where they might be playing catch-up or be completely uncompetitive all season long if they go for the wrong equipment or find themselves face to face with all-out pro-squads. Now, the attraction of the LM 24h can serve as somewhat of a mitigating factor here as teams and drivers might be willing to accept the hardship of not being guaranteed competitiveness if they can say that they participated in the Great Race. Unfortunately, that, does not translate completely to the year-long series, especially when a large chunk of the Le Mans slots is blocked for WEC teams and only limited contingents from IMSA and ELMS can even hope to be invited. So in a way, the ACO and the affiliated series were under pressure to move towards BoP and Pro/Am classes as soon as their competitors such as SRO and Grand Am had switched towards that model.
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Having two identical Oreca 03/05/07s sitting next to each other and second of the cars having different chassis/homologation title than the other, that's not the same as rebadging entire fleet of the same exact car (ie Morgan etc)
As you sort of pointed out, ACO has one thing none of these other championships and organizers do - the Le Mans 24 Hours. With that card alone you could pretty much dictate what you want, and not to follow the "guaranteed success" models of others. Because let's face it, whatever ACO does you will always get full grid of cars for Le Mans - this is not 1992 anymore.
However, now that they indeed have given up, there is no going back anymore, because the crowd has already settled in for the said guaranteed success.