Autoweek - January 23_ 2017 magazine-pdf.org

2017 RACING PREVIEW
AGAIN, THERE
WERE TWO
WEC AND LE MANS SHOULD BE JUST FINE
DESPITE AUDI’S SURPRISE LMP1 EXIT
BY GARY WATKINS
THE WORLD ENDURANCE
Championship—and, more pertinently,
the Le Mans 24 Hours—
without Audi won’t quite seem the same.
But is its departure from the series a true
body blow? The answer is probably not.
After a 20-year hiatus—the series, then
called the World Sports Car Championship,
had last run in 1992—the WEC was
reborn in 2012 with only two manufacturers.
Really only one (Audi) and a half:
Toyota had to step up to the plate in what
it had initially planned as a come-and-go
development year around Le Mans before
Peugeot’s late pull-out left the organizers
with a problem. The Audi-versus-Toyota
confrontation developed quite nicely, with
the Japanese manufacturer emerging as a
race winner before its first season back in
the top flight of sports-car racing was over.
Some of sports-car racing’s greatest eras
were founded on just two manufacturers
running at the front of the field, most recently
at the end of the 2000s and the beginning
of this decade when Audi and
Peugeot duked it out at Le Mans and beyond.
Was anyone crying out for a third
manufacturer when Audi vanquished
Peugeot against the odds in the classic
2008 Le Mans confrontation? How about
again in 2011 when just 13 seconds separated
the two marques? Nope.
The WEC’s situation is that one of its
manufacturers disappearing from LMP1
removes the safety net of three factory participants.
The WEC is now vulnerable, but,
again, should be OK. Were either Porsche
or Toyota to follow Audi’s lead, well, that’s
a different story. That explains the rules
freeze announced after last November’s
WEC Bahrain finale. New regulations to
Timo Bernhard, Mark
Webber and Brendon
Hartley’s Porsche 919
Hybrid competes in
Shanghai last fall.
increase the P1 class’ scope of energy
retrieval, originally planned in 2018,
have been delayed. The present rule book,
which includes rule changes to the aero
package designed to give more downforce
to the factory P1 cars previously put in
place for 2017, remains in force until after
the 2019 season. The move was billed as
an attempt to prevent further cost escalations
at a time when no potential newcomers
to the high-tech P1 class have poked
their head above the parapet. The truth is,
there have been no takers under today’s
regulations, so what it probably does is
buy the WEC some time to come up with
entirely new regulations for 2020.
Meanwhile, the hope must be Porsche
and Toyota both stick around, remain
competitive and put on a show the series
and Le Mans, in particular, deserve. c
30 AUTOWEEK JANUARY 23, 2017