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Finally managed to watch the race and I have to say I enjoyed it much more than any other involving (modern) ACO cars for a long time. Despite the eventual penalty for the race winner, the P2 battle was rather interesting and partly even exciting between Dallara-Oreca-Oak. The two-class P2 was neither a boring spec-Oreca-parade like in the ELMS or soulless bop nonsense like in 98% of the other categories, including the success-penalty-P1 dire, DPi and upcoming Hypercar mess. So comparatively speaking, for what there is in offer right now, it's not bad at all.

Now, speaking of the end result, I don't even remember the last time I really cheered for a win so much the last time, so it felt really bad seeing the Carlin win stripped away... as well as the fake "Aurus" Oreca winning and taking headlines for non-manufacturer, add in Rusinov's struggles... but as I always say, rules are rules and I rather have the organizers force them fully, and not just let people off the hook. In the end, Carlin did mess it up themselves. Someone in the SC365 comments said "More and more it gets similar to Nascar" yet this is exact opposite of NASCAR trash, up there Carlin would have kept the win in order to "not confuse fans" and only got some team points taken away... that's much worse...

In the legacy P2s, the RW Oak team never doing any mileage prior to the race but still coming second after gremlins for Bratislava, which had been faster than the eventual winning RLR Oreca 05... it was somewhat nostalgically old school how it all turned out. I still wish someone was running Judd, but speaking of 05, I only now remembered how much I liked the looks of it, just as I did the original Rebellion-Oreca P1. It'somewhat ironic that the car is somewhat of a rarity nowadays with the spec 07 being so common.

Goodwin, the awkward pit reporter as well as JLOC's own driver calling the team a "newcomer" in Asian Le Mans Series made me laugh when it was indeed JLOC that won the very first ASLMS event in Okayama 2009... as well as qualified for pole in the next event in 2010... maybe they should do some research further into the past sometimes

The worst part about the weekend was clearly the TV production. The director missed a lot of things, stream was horribly over-saturated (the long straight shot was especially painful to look at), and of course as said the ASLMS pit reporter lady still is awkward to look at. The positive thing was that they did cover the old-gen-P2 class on TV pretty nicely, which could have been ignored pretty easily in other circles.

Anyway, Bend should be pretty good, especially as it's also much more interesting track than the definition of sterile that is Shanghai International Circuit.