Some 20 years after the demise of the original world championship for sports cars, and after a number of false dawns, the series is finally to be re-instigated. The FIA World Endurance Championship begins next year and just might signal the beginning of another classic era for sports car racing. If the likes of Toyota and Jaguar – both known to be weighing up a return to the prototype ranks to join Audi, Peugeot and Porsche – are swayed by the chance to race for a world title then the outlook is good.
The WEC, which revives the name used for the 40-season world championship in 1981-'85, isn't entirely new, of course: it's effectively a re-branding of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup. The Automobile Club de l'Ouest-run series, currently in its first full season, had already come to be regarded as a world championship in all but name. World status for the ILMC in 2012 was both a natural step and a required step, and one that the major participants had been pushing for from the word go.
Perhaps Hugues de Chaunac, whose ORECA team won this year's ILMC opener at Sebring with a year-old Peugeot 908 HDi summed it up best when he said, “ILMC means nothing. It must be a world championship.” De Chaunac was spot on because the ILMC was a world championship in all but name, but its difficult-to-say acronym made it near impossible to promote. In contrast, the World Endurance Championship means exactly what it says. And that will be important when motorsports bosses head into the boardroom, cap in hand, when marketing men knock on a sponsor's door and when racetracks put up posters for a forthcoming round of the championship.
If the ILMC, with the Le Mans 24 Hours at its heart, was exactly what long-distance sports car racing needed, then the World Endurance Championship was the banner it needed. Yet is it all good news? The answer to that question is almost certainly “No.” There's a lot of sports car racing in the world right now and the cake can only be cut so many ways: the more championships there are, the thinner the slices.
There's even a world championship for sports cars already, though it's not the spiritual successor of the series that ran from 1953 to '92. The FIA GT1 World Championship is something different altogether. It is not an endurance championship – the races are only one hour in duration, there is (sacrilegiously to the minds of many) no refueling, overt manufacturer participation in the form of full factory teams is not allowed and, of course, there are no prototypes.
FIA GT1 was given the go-ahead under the old Max Mosley regime at the governing body of world motorsport. His successor, Jean Todt, was making positive noises about a world championship for endurance racing from the beginning of his presidency in October 2009 and, on the announcement of the WEC during Le Mans week this year, he revealed that discussions about the series had begun almost immediately after he took his current role. He believes there is room for both world championships because they are “completely different concepts.”
Yet inevitably they'll be, to some extent, competing for the same teams and manufacturers, the same sponsors, the same TV airtime and events at the same tracks. If two series so different are competitors, then what about the championships that will run to the same rulebook as the ILMC – namely, the American Le Mans Series and the Le Mans Series in Europe? The competition for entries, whether from factory or privateer teams, will be intense.
Would Audi be racing full time in the ALMS this year if there was no ILMC? There's good evidence to suggest it would. Audi North America had a budget, reputed to be $5 million, and was looking for ways of topping up that figure to bring a pair of last year's R15+ LMP1s onto the grid for the whole season. Highcroft Racing came close to securing a deal to represent Audi in the ALMS, while Penske Racing and at least one other team is known to have had discussions about the plan.
The hope must be that the arrival of a world championship will increase the pool of manufacturers competing in international sports car racing and that some of the big players will opt for multiple programs. That's certainly a scenario that ALMS boss Scott Atherton can envisage.
“Is there a concern? I'd be lying if I said there wasn't,” he says, “but the U.S. is a very big market for most of the manufacturers involved and, for most of them, it represents one of their top priorities. It is very difficult to build an audience when you are in a market one or two weekends a year. Formula 1 found that.”
Say Toyota presses the button on its plans to return to the prototype ranks and mounts a WEC program around its first bid for outright honors at Le Mans since 1999 (RIGHT). Surely it would therefore consider an ALMS program in a country in which it's a major player and has built cars, as well as sold them, since the 1980s? There's no official answer to that question because the Japanese manufacturer refuses to talk about its plans except to say that it's continuing to evaluate hybrid technology for racing. But if Toyota returns to Le Mans to promote a message, why wouldn't it want to sing the same song in a marketplace where it sells more hybrids than any other manufacturer?
The competition for cars will be even more keenly felt in terms of privateers. When the ILMC was first proposed at Le Mans in 2009, the focus was very much on manufacturer LMP1 teams. The original idea was effectively to parachute the manufacturers chasing outright glory at Le Mans onto the existing LMS and ALMS grids, something Audi was already doing at Sebring and Petit Le Mans and at Spa-Francorchamps.
That has changed significantly, so much so that the ILMC entry list for this year stands at 26 cars spread across four classes. There are manufacturers' titles on offer in LMP1 and GTE and teams' titles in all four divisions. Next year, there will be overall drivers' and manufacturers' world champions crowned from the LMP1 division, while manufacturers in the GTE Pro class will compete for a World Cup and teams in LMP2 and GTE Am compete for FIA Trophies.
The ACO is talking about having 35 cars traveling around the world next year to contest the seven-race WEC. The likelihood is that those extra 10 or so cars are already competing somewhere, probably in either the LMS or the ALMS.
The LMS, which is jointly promoted by the ACO but run on the ground by the Paris-based Le Mans Endurance Organization, will be plowing its own furrow next year. One gets the impression that series boss Patrick Peter believes the rug was pulled from under his feet by the creation of the ILMC and now the WEC. So the LMS will race separately from the WEC next season and it was decided at Peter's suggestion that the LMP1 division will be dropped. No great loss: it's been a shadow of its former self on weekends when the ILMC cars aren't present.
Inevitably then, relations between Peter and the ACO have definitely cooled over the past year. How the relationship develops between the ACO and the FIA, two organizations which were traditionally never happy bedfellows, will be key to the success or failure of the WEC. ACO president Jean-Claude Plassart has also been keen to point out that the relationship has always been cordial under his watch, and the arrival of Todt at FIA headquarters in Paris appears to have improved that.
But the question remains, who is in charge of the WEC? The ACO is the promoter, that much is certain, but on technical issues the situation is less clear. Todt says the FIA will be in charge of technical and sporting rules, the ACO says it there will be a joint responsibility.
The World Endurance Championship has to be good news for sports car racing, at least at its very pinnacle, because it's good news for manufacturers investing in expensive LMP1 programs. What it means further down the food chain will be revealed by the entry lists for the WEC and other sports car championships.
• For the full version of this feature article, plus much more, check out the October 2011 issue of RACER magazine, which is NOT available on newsstands. CLICK HERE to subscribe.