Quote:
Originally Posted by carbsmith
Because the ACO's business model is entirely based around Le Mans, which operates on an entirely different plane from the rest of sports car racing. That race alone is one of the few things in motorsport that approaches F1 for prestige and attention and they've always tried to pull up the sport with that rather than pull down the race to the level of everything else like Indy did.
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Maybe until 2012, but with the advent of BoP and bespoke privateer classes, they abandoned any pretext of that at least for the GT classes. Next was new LMP2 aka the Oreca-Gibson cartel, and with hypercar/LMDH even the top class is falling into that mold now.
It's really a shame, though. Rebellion and SMP did a great job at showing us that open development between privateers is still a viable concept - and I'm sure even more private teams would join the fray if they had no manufacturers to content with and thus a reasonable chance at an overall victory at LM.