Quote:
Originally Posted by DS"
@Speed-King: Back in the day, you only had LMS and FIA GT in Europe. The national championships in Europe also weren't as strong as they are today. But now you have WEC, a possible ELMS for 2013 and strong national series. I honestly can't see where Blancpain would fit between all these series. Especially since all these series run on a single set of regulations. I only see a SLIGHT chance for Blancpain as a championship for truly private teams, in case the GT class in WEC becomes a manufacturer battlefield. But even then, you'd still have ELMS as an alternative for manufacturers.
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WEC is going to be wickedly expensive, no matter the actual ruleset, that's just the nature of the FIA-label and the kind of schedule they are running.
As for ELMS - we'll have to see where that goes, if 2012 is anything to go buy, there won't be a lot of interest from the GT3 ranks to run in that series. Sure, a unified ruleset and potential LM invites might help somewhat, but right now I wouldn't think of ELMS as a stronger series than BES. One has 40 cars on the grid, the other has 14...
Finally, I think we've seen the peak of most European national GT series for the time being. French GT was already pretty weak this year, British GT is doing somewhat better, but only has less than 20 proper GT3 cars as well -with the rest of the field being made up by national homologations, invitational cars and GT4s, and even ADAC GT seems to be in for some major shrinkage over the off season. With Kabel 1 most likely out of the picture, getting live TV will be quite a task and a lot of teams were less than thrilled with the way BoP was handled this year, so I think we'll be down to 25 cars or so next year.
Blancpain is going to be fine... it's the other series I am worried about.