Endurance racing, well, has endured. It’s been woven into motorsports’ fabric from the very beginning. Epic events such as the Rolex 24 At Daytona, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring and the 24 Hours of Le Mans are bucket-list events for teams, drivers and fans.
But there is, as some say, “Trouble in River City.”
The sheer length of these events make them difficult and expensive to televise. It’s very hard for producers to build enough captivating content to keep viewers interested for the duration.
FOX Sports started televising the World Endurance Championship in 2014 and 93,000 viewers watched each race. Viewership has declined since then to just 65,000. It’s virtually impossible to attract and keep sponsors with numbers like these, so FOX Sports will not carry the WEC this year.
Then there’s the sheer expense of building and campaigning the cars. LMP1, the fastest class, has given the world truly impressive racing cars. Audi Sport ruled the roost for 18 years. The Ingolstadt-based team piled up 106 wins and more than a dozen championships. Their TDi cars proved diesels are neither slow nor stinky. They continued to evolve into the amazing diesel hybrids.
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Peugeot gave Audi a run for its money but never showed the sheer dominance of the Audis. Porsche picked up where Audi left off in 2015 with the 919 hybrid. Toyota joined the fight and has given Porsche fits, especially in 2017, yet Porsche came away with a WEC championship in its final year of LMP1.
Although Toyota has announced it will return this year, the class is on life support, largely due to the expense of these cars. Other WEC production-based GT classes have major factory support and will most likely survive.
Connecting the dots, it’s apparent that endurance racing is unsustainable in its current form. It’s outrageously expensive at the top level and it’s difficult to televise. Those factors make it difficult to find and retain enough sponsorship to support the genre.
Case in point: Porsche’s entry and exit after just three years was a simple matter of German pragmatism. Porsche’s Fritz Enzinger, vice president of the LMP1 program, explained why the company returned and why it left.
“The World Endurance Championship was due to the introduction of new technical regulations,” Enzinger said. “It was amazing: You had to build a race car on Formula One levels with a roof. … It was the ultimate test and accelerator of future technical development. There was no fear of failure. It was just about searching for the limits under the pressure of competition. … We had to compete against Audi and Toyota — the big ones that had a lot of recent experience that we lacked. Winning the Le Mans 24 Hours three times in a row in various circumstances and taking three manufacturers’ world championship titles as well as three consecutive drivers’ world championships, obviously, is an amazing tally.”
Enzinger said the LMP1 effort was very expensive: “Fielding an LMP1 car within the structure of these regulations was very expensive for Porsche, especially as we had to start from scratch. The team is based at the Porsche R&D center at Weissach, which is very important as it allows us to share every minute detail of knowledge with the development guys for future road cars. However, initially, we had no buildings, no people for the team, no infrastructure and no nothing. It was a long and a hard way to get everything in place.”
Source : speedsport.com
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