[Deleted]

Originally Posted by Speed-King

But that's not what smart business men do, propping up a failing program with money from a well-running one.

That being said, I guess you have a point with them making enough money with the 03 and 05. But even if so, there was no guarantee that they would keep on selling cars in sufficient numbers in the future. After all, even once thriving constructors like Spice and Lola ran into trouble over time.

Fair enough, and I think whatever we say about Hughes, it is true that he is indeed a smart businessman. He may indeed be smarter than any other figurehead in the sport right now when it comes to getting ROI together, even Oak/Onroak has not managed to get the wheels spinning at same rate. Savior of the Sport however, not so much... more like Destroyer of the Sport, even if he never has wanted any harm to it...

There's never complete guarantees of anything, not unless you orchestrate it to be guaranteed, like has happened here let's face it. Too bad Spice and even Lola competed in the age when you couldn't directly manipulate the sport for one's liking.

Anyway, as said, the old (Courage-)Oreca 03R had some years still with it's latest EVO package, but more than that the Oreca 05 proved at Le Mans 2015 and 2016 that it was essentially engineered and optimized for winning that race more than any other chassis. Had they kept going with the old regulations, or even variation of it, the sales of O5 surely would have been sufficient enough to push the little "annoyances" from Zytek, HPD, SMP and others for even smaller market share. The tech freeze regulations already meant that if you couldn't beat Oreca 05 at Le Mans, you would have had to build new chassis altogether if switching engines or whatever failed or new EVO kit wasn't enough.

I'm not too sure about that. I don't remember the exact year, but not too long ago, the ACO actually had not enough entries to completely fill up the ten reserve slots. And that was at a time when the economic climate was somewhat decent.

I feel as if that's more the fault of (theoretical) requirement to be a full season entrant in ACO championship, or even that not being enough to get the spot on the entry list. Especially if you're LMP team, with bias towards GTE. What I meant was more along the lines of, you probably would get 150 entry request each year if the said requirements were taken off again.

I wouldn't be quite as pessimistic. Eventually, the current leadership at the ACO will retire, and maybe the next guys will actually value innovation again. It's not a perfect analogy, but the touring car series in both Sweden and Denmark went from running all-out silhouettes to TCR, which despite the BoP requires builders to at least come up with a somewhat decent car. So a series going less spec is not completely unheard of.

Maybe this is a process that needs to happen in small steps, so here is a modest proposal: Provided the ACO see some value in allowing innovation and open competition again, they should set aside a small number (six or so) of slots on the grid for a new class. Let's call it LMP-C, with the C Standing for "constructor". To make sure that this new class does not get dominated by major OEMs, their performance should be somewhere in the vicinity of LMP3. Additionally, the ACO should provide all teams with a spec tub. This, however, would be the only common-part shared by the cars in the class as the rules for LMP-C would specifically require all teams to create their own cars around that tub (much like HPD, Oreca and Pescarolo created their own cars based on the Courage tub). That way, you'd have a cost-effective class that would still encourage innovation - and a good test balloon to determine if more open competition would actually be attractive for teams, drivers, sponsors and fans.

The current leadership at the ACO is only mirroring what's happening in the rest of motorsport I'm afraid, so I'm not sure if changing of the gang is really going to make a difference if the next one is just going to continue following the norm of everyone else. There's always going to be new arrogant Vincent Beaumesnil.

Regarding the TCR example, cars relying on regular BoP route over spec route is even worse in my books, but I think I've covered that side of the argument only too well in my thousands of posts. As a side note however, I'd like to ask about your line "which despite the BoP requires builders to at least come up with a somewhat decent car". I had thought TCR was just touring car version of GT3(/GTE)?

I find your proposal, well, better than anything else on the "2021 and beyond" grid, and especially the LMP3 speed range is pretty much the same I've suggested for G56-type innovation prototype class. The spec tub class isn't something I'm particularly fond of - and after all the examples you gave didn't choose the tub in question because they "had to" - but I guess it would work as compromise. At least it would be something. In this day and age something is the maximum that can be asked