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Grandfathering PCs and expecting them to run against P2s and P1s wouldn’t work for a few reasons, I think.
First is cost. P2s don’t do engine rebuilds, I hear, all season long, and cannot do any engine upgrades—engines are sealed units. PCs use cheaper, heavier components everywhere throughout the car, use a spec tire, and are not designed to be widely adjustable.
Not only purchasing cost, but Operating cost, is lower on PCs. Lose that and the class becomes both meaningless as an entry class and possibly unsupportable by the car owners.
To make PCs even close to competitive with P2s and P1s they would need to become a lot more expensive to run, or be given gigantic performance balancing breaks. This would either drive out some of the marginally funded PC teams (thus defeating the whole purpose) or seriously insult the teams which spent a bundle to buy Lolas, Morgans, and HPDs.
Slowing down the top class to include the bottom class doesn’t strike me as a formula for success, but there is only so far PCs can be speeded up without making them real (as opposed to spec) race cars.
This would also involve crew costs. The PC teams would need more engineers and more data acquisition and analysis if they were going to be choosing form a much wider range of dampers, for instance, and had to do more engine and aero work. Again, this could drive up the cost of running a PC to where the teams which can barely run a PC would have to drop out.
Encouraging teams to invest in new cars is great ... if the teams can afford those new cars, and can afford to run them.
As Chiana points out, if they cannot keep pace with the real prototypes, they effectively run in their own class anyway, and lumping them into a unified “P” class would just be hype. But ”grandfathering” wouldn’t work because there would be almost no way to make them both competitive and affordable. It is fine to let some teams run last year’s model if a few kilograms of weight can basically balance their performance with this year’s models, but in PC that just isn’t the case (as I see it.)
Considering Lola might not be making cars next season, I’d imagine that the whole issue might be resolved by once again uniting P1 and P2, and balancing through ballast.
I wouldn’t worry about any of this. In 2014 a whole new definition of all these cars will be promulgated by ACO, and all of these considerations will be moot. Possibly none of the existing cars will be legal, and ALMS will have to make some hard, hard decisions about its rules. Also, the FLM09s are getting a bit old now—they might become a self-solving problem. The question then will be how to create a prototype class formula which is at once affordable and exciting, to meet the specific economic situations faced here in the U.S.?
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