Factory Involvement...Good or Bad?

[TRuss]

With all the talk and specualation of the seasons to come, and the manufacturers who will be involved, it makes me wonder if this factory involvement will be good or bad in the long run. Or. Is it just part of a cycle?

I think we all agree, that all of the news and speculation of possible factory entries is good. It will increase car count, competition plus it tends to give us amazing machines to gawk at...which is probably the best of all.

At the same time, it makes it increasingly difficult for the privateer entries who always have and always will make up the majority of the grid. Especially once the factories lose interest, and money and begin to pull out. This inevitably always happens. One factory is willing to spend more money than the rest, ends up dominating the series and the competiors pull out. Following closely behind the dominant factory will pull out do to it's only competion being the privateers. While winning is always nice, beating up on a privateer team with half the funding or less hardly makes for a good magazine ad.

So then once again, provided that the series survives, it comes down to the privateers to soldier on and to make the series as exciting and as profitable as possible until the factory brand managers once again decide that this series would be a good place to market themselves...and we start all over again.

Though with the way things are headed in LMP2 it seems that maybe some lessons have been learned. Let's hope