|
That's a good post, AndrewF31. I can't disagree with anything you said really. As far as sports car racing surviving, sure, it will survive. There are too many rich guys who want to drive something really fast in competition for it not to survive. Ultimately, however, I think there is only so many blows a form of racing can take before it becomes tainted goods. Take Indycar for example. I can't imagine a single scenario where Indycar returns to being a fraction of what it was even during the post-NASCAR ascent period. Natural ups and downs are one thing, but dumb and greedy decision making is a different story. The ACO may have had goodwill all these years because someone else was always the evildoer before, but that could change this time.
One of the very bad signs is that the ACO was willing to grab a bag of money (blood money, IMO) and schedule over an established great race that could cause a lot of good publicity for the type of racing whether it was a WEC race or not without even telling the ALMS. They found out about it the same time we did supposedly. The teams were not informed about Bahrain either. It was a surprise to them. How is that wise decision making? Is the greed so high that they will grab bags of money anywhere without consulting their most essential stakeholders? Do they even know who the most important stakeholders are? I've seen a lot of stupidity by racing series over the years, but that move may have been one if the worst I've seen. Shameful, what more can I say?
Long term, the current WEC calendar isn't tenable. Even the big money teams are complaining about the condensed nature of the bottom end of the schedule. What are the smaller teams thinking? Of course, they can blame the big teams to some extent because they don't want to race a lot before Le Mans. I think that has a lot to do with BoP and sandbagging. Again, BoP is killing the sport, but that is a whole different story. Anyway, the WEC has to do a better job balancing the schedule. They don't have a lot of races so harmonizing it with other partner series should not be too difficult. In theory. We see what happens in practice. Running on opposite weeks as F1 can be beneficial in someways, but successful series do what's best for them. If it comes down to competing with the ALMS or competing with F1, they need to compete with F1 because otherwise you're making the small base of fans and media choose which sports car race to follow. That's a net negative for both.
Ultimately, there are big reasons for the ALMS to go on their own now aside from the ACO's predatory behavior. The predatory behavior just adds a lot of fuel to the fire. As for the ELMS, I don't know. The LMS was always a fun little series even when it did not have the heavy hitters. The racing was often very good and competitive. It's not fun to see it wither away. The ELMS may not be much, but I think a lot of fans will miss it when it's gone.
|