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The commitment to sportscar racing starts falling apart when you look long term. Teams like JMW have provided a long term commitment to ACO racing and were cast aside for to fit in another factory Ford GT in their first year. That wasn’t about commitment, that was purely about money. Manufactures commitment drops off pretty quickly when it suits them. And then the ACO has to run back to the small teams that were committed and hope they’ll fill the gap again.
Whilst I don’t want to see the grid filled with cars that are out of their depth (Mr Krohn has thankfully found a good home in Creventic and is better off for it), there has to be a balance between keeping the small team numbers healthy and having factory support. Otherwise you put yourself in the situation that LMP1 had where we had a crisis. If it’s about who “deserves” a slot as you put it, some of these amateur teams have given more to ACO racing than, for example, CORE Autosport has (no offence to CORE of course). Seems to be that commitment and deserving are getting muddled up with money here.
ACO has gone to great lengths (some of which we don’t all agree with...) to get a good healthy grid of LMP2 cars. To then tell those cars that they can’t run at Le Mans could be catastrophic to some teams projects. GTE-Am is a little different as there’s an argument to be made that that’s just field filling for when things were weak anyway.
I think it’s a perfectly reasonable argument to make to say manufacturers should be allowed 3 cars max, regardless of who runs the car. That’s not like it’s cutting off a limb. And as long as those cars aren’t being replaced by an entry that’s out of its depth then I don’t see the problem. We can talk about the personnel involved but at the end of the day it's a factory entry and the intent, support, money and resulting headlines are all the same.
I'd like to see organisers learn from their mistakes rather than repeat them over and over again. We've been through this cycle recently. Let's not do it again. It's like 3 car teams are small and there are regulations that are meant to prevent this anyway - they just don't use them. If IMSA started turning away IMSA teams From Daytona to fit some one of ACO regulars in, there would be riots.
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