The good news is that most stakeholders also agree that having two sets of regs is daft and that from 2030—when the current rulesets expire—everyone should be reading from the same sheet.
“The way to go forward is to have one category. And everybody behind the scenes… there’s a lot of talks, a lot of meetings, and they’re going exactly that way,” said Urs Kuratle, head of Porsche’s prototype program. “On the other hand, with the big success sports car racing had in the past four years, we also have great races in the WEC with the Hypercars. We have record crowds, both sides of the Atlantic. So that basically proves that concept also works. And if it was the enabler, the two different congregations or regulatories or whatever, that was the way to enable the sports car renaissance, then it was a good success. If you would ask, it would have been clever to do it with one rule set from just beginning, the answer would also be yes. But it worked,” Kuratle told me.
What does this sport look like in five years?
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Brandon Badraoui/Lumen via Getty Images
It looks likely that IMSA’s approach will win the day. “We see the next set of regulations as being an evolution of LMDH, and there’s got to be a way to have everybody see the value of what has happened with LMDH. And the OEMs did by saying, “Well, geez, I could run in the top category in a pretty cost-effective manner,” Doonan said. “Without being repetitive, stability is critical in so many areas of this right now because when headwinds that we don’t control come, my hope would be that this would be… a place where automakers can come market, Michelin and Motul can come market,” Doonan said.
One reason some of us love prototype racing is that in many cases it really has improved our road cars. Direct technology transfer from the racetrack to the road is less common than it was, but still happens—Porsche’s T-hybrid engine and its electric turbocharger are directly descended from Porsche’s 919 Hybrid race car, for example.