Bill Oursler on the ALMS’ View of Elephant Mountain

Bill Oursler on the ALMS’ View of Elephant Mountain

In the fast moving world of motorsport, patience remains a virtue. It is far better to

take a bit of extra time, whether during a pit stop, or in writing the regulations that

determine its look and often its outcome, than to plunge ahead without regard for

the consequences simply to satisfy momentary needs. Unfortunately, those

seemingly overwhelming needs too often drive patience not only to the back of

one’s mind, but outside of it altogether.

Never was that more clear than the difficult position the old Camel GT found itself

at the start of the 1993 season when there were just two serious contestants for

the IMSA-bred championship: Dan Gurney’s All American Toyota prototypes and

Reinhold Joest’s two aging, and only semi-effective counterpart Porsche 962s.

The year previous IMSA and its Camel tour had been riding high with

manufacturer entries from Nissan, the aforementioned Gurney Toyota squad,

Chevrolet, Jaguar and Mazda in the headlining GTP category, and Honda in the

Camel Lights division. The problem with this wretched excess was that at the end

of the season there could be just a single crown winner for each class, and while

Honda and Toyota emerged with smiles on their faces, the rest did not.

In fact, so displeased were they and their financial departments that they took

their cars and went home, starting a slide for IMSA that only stopped with the

arrival of Don Panoz late in the decade. With Panoz came the birth of the American

Le Mans Series, the current heir to the long tradition of sports car competition

extending back to its re-establishment in the years immediately following the end

of the Second World War.

Baltic and Mediterranean to Boardwalk and Park Place and back…
During the time since, the ALMS has had its successes and its failures in trying

to overcome the unfortunate legacy left to it by the failure of the GTP universe, a

failure that was, at least in this columnist’s opinion unnecessary. One has to

admit here that being a critic with the unwanted burden of responsibility for fixing

the things thought to be wrong is far easier than giving to actually make the

changes, and make them work as planned.

Even so, it seems clear that the perception surrounding the decision by IMSA’s

management in the late 1980’s to cripple the relatively large number of 962s

running in the series through new restrictive rules led to their owners’ deciding to

park, rather than continue to race them. In the short term, IMSA’s actions were

highly effective bringing in new manufacturers and teams, this pumping in some

much needed new life into a championship whose importance could be rightly be

said to have been seriously diluted by the Porsche’s domination of it. Yet, when

1993 arrived and IMSA needed desperately to boost its extremely thin fields, those

962s, which could have helped eliminate that problem, remained at home under

dust covers.

Now the revitalized IMSA and the ALMS are beginning to find themselves in

somewhat similar circumstances. In spite of the series’ recent gains in terms of

the announcement at Portland that Andretti-Green, Adrian Fernandez and Duncan

Dayton’s Highcroft Racing teams will represent Honda next year in LMP2, the size

of the ALMS grids have not substantially increased this season. Indeed, if anything

they are down, with just 22 cars starting at Portland as further evidence of that fact.

Stay, just a little bit longer…
The result of those small fields has put pressure on the ALMS and IMSA to keep

its competitors happy, lest they decide, like the 962 brigade a decade and a half

earlier, to take their toys and go home. Complicating matters is the competing

pressure to make the ALMS entertaining for the fans, something which has led

IMSA to introduce its “performance balancing” program to keep a level playing field

in order to provide a variety of winners.

Unfortunately, just as the previous generation of IMSA folks (and even the SCCA

before it when it attempted to “balance” its original Can-Am by essentially

legislating the Porsche turbos out of the tour in order to give the largely privateer

corps of no boosted Chevrolet entrants a chance, and wound it killing the

championship instead) “performance balancing” can be a slippery slope. The

reason for spending the huge amounts of money to race is to win, which means

there are going to be a great many displeased losers.

This year the non winners have been more than a little vocal in espousing their

cause, with the result that regulatory changes to implement performance

balancing have come so fast that one could say that IMSA and the ALMS have

been operating not on the “rules of the day,” but rather the “rules of the moment,”

with changes coming so quickly as to be bewildering. Take for example the Dyson

Racing AER Lolas which were given a 40 kilo weight break for Portland, only to

have IMSA want to put 20 kilos back before the start of the event itself. And, as if

that weren’t enough, after the Corvette complained about the fact that IMSA had

mandated smaller air restrictors for the GM sports cars after having saddled them

with some 300 pounds of extra weight to make them more equal with the ProDrive

Aston Martins, IMSA reversed itself almost immediately on the air restrictor issue,

upsetting the ProDrive contingent and leading to rumors that the Aston Martins

might not come to Road America.

Taxation without representation
Obviously ALMS can ill afford to have a team such as ProDrive even think drop out

at this point, or have Rob Dyson contemplate about doing the same. Yet, just as

obviously IMSA needs not to be acting in haste. Originally one of the attractions of

the ALMS was the promise of rules stability, something which has gotten lost in

the “performance balancing” equations as it is currently being implemented.

Moreover, no one should have been surprised about the performance superiority

of such cars as the Audi R10 turbo diesels, or the Roger Penske run Porsche RS

Spyders. Likewise Aston Martin has had more than a year to figure out where they

spend against the Corvettes, just as the privateer Porsche teams who are running

the now three-season old 996-based 911 GT3RSRs ought to be shocked that the

new Risi Ferrari 430GT is the faster car in the GT2 category.

To complain about these disadvantages is like the homeowner by what should

have been a half million dollar home for a tenth of that price and then bitching that

it even though it is next door to Kennedy Airport, the airport should shut down so

the homeowner can sleep in peace. The saying “buyer beware” applies here to

both the homeowner and the ALMS entrants.

No strikes, no balls, four errors
Before the 2006 ALMS campaign even started, everyone knew from winter testing

who was going to be fast, and by how much. To suddenly cry “foul” is more than a

bit disingenuous. High technology based racing means that everyone is going to

push the technology limits on an on-going basis, a process which is equally going

to lead to in inequities. So if you know that starting out, why complain later. IMSA is

right to use performance balancing to make its series better, but not in what

appears to be an “Ad Hoc” way. If the “losers” want so desperately to win, then let

them go to the Rolex Grand Am tour where they won’t have to worry about being

technology challenged.

Bill Oursler
August 2006