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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.
I'm just tired of the whole minimal effort/instant gratification crowd.
I also know that IMSA and the ACO want classes that are less vulnerable to the swings of the economy and manufacturer interest. But you only get that if you make it appealing to privateers. It also wouldn't hurt if factory teams/OEMs were more willing to sell cars to customer teams. But even in GT racing (especially GTE and GTLM), that's the exception rather than the rule now.
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