Quote:
mawyatt said:
dan996,

I would like to believe that the Le Mans series can survive without parity in the classes, but I don't think it can. IMO for the series to be successful here in the US we need excitement for the general public like NASCAR brings. Sebring this year with the dramatic GT2 finish and the Acura win will do nothing but help the series. We sports car fans are to few here in the US, check your local newspaper for any writeup about Sebring, even with these dramatic events...not much here in Clearwater/St Pete Florida! Like it or not NASCAR is very successful because of the parity they have forced, anyone can win any race anytime. I even got bored over the years watching Porsche win every GT2 race until Panoz and Ferarri stole some wins. It was like watching a Porsche Cup race instead of GT2, not much fun IMO. Audi has completely distroyed P1 and we seriously need some challengers in P1 and GT1. I don't think GT1 will survive because it's almost as expensive to field a winning GT1 car as a P1 or P2 car, and only very high end private (Dyson & Pensky for example) with factory support or true factory teams (Audi, Corvette, Acura) can support this investment.

This is a business and must show value added, meaning large audience awareness for the sponsors and factory investments to pay off. This can only happen if we have classes that are not dominated by one manufactor, where any race can be won by any car anytime with races like the Sebring GT2 finish.

Just my thoughts,

Mike



Mike,
I don't diagree with you on many points, I do think we will always need some parity, just not to the point that you can not tell the difference between a Chevy, Ford or Chrysler. Would we like it if in the race we could not tell the difference between a Porsche, Ferrari or Aston Martin. What I would like to see is when one brand is dominating give them weight or some restrictions. This has been working in LeMans series. They gave the Audi R8 many restrictions over the years that is why Dyson was getting competative and if Porsche were more reliable they would be beating Audi. Now with the restrictions that have been given to Audi the LMP2 catagory cars could be beating them this year...but Audi came prepared and reengineered the car so that it was more driveable according to the drivers. They could push the R10 harder and get better lap times but they still were pushed hard by Acura and could have been by Porsche. If this were Grand Am I would still be trying to figure out which car was the Acura and which was the Porsche. For the most part I agree with what you are saying, I want more manufactuers out there pushing Audi, Porsche, Acura, Aston Martin and so on. We should encourage BMW, Mercedes, Cadillac and every other manufactuer to come out and play within the rules and see who can come up with new engineering that could beat everyone else. This is why we get new cars, because they have the state of the art engineering.