| Rocking Horse World David Soares on myths and tragedies After an initial flurry of press releases and posturing, things are strangely quiet about the controversy between the International Motor Sports Association and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest over the special exemption for the FIA GT- homologated Maserati MC12 entered for this week’s Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring. It seems that most sports car commentators don’t know whether to shit or go blind and are waiting to see who takes to the track. As a person who prefers just about anything to blindness, my urge is to go on record before the controversy plays out and to be either dramatically right or embarrassingly wrong. The why… First of all: Don Panoz’ money was spent to establish the American Le Mans Series. Every serious competitor in IMSA’s premier sanctioned series is there to get an invitation to the Big One in France in June. This is the Big Leagues and requires a big commitment. The leading teams in this series have heavy factory support from manufacturers who want to sell cars under the halo of a Le Mans victory. If you don’t have what it takes you should probably be somewhere else. When the ALMS started there wasn't a somewhere else. Now there is: the Grand American Road Racing Association’s Rolex Series for Daytona Prototypes. People tired of getting their clocks cleaned by factory-backed teams have defected to the DP ranks in droves. Setting aside the selective arrival of manufacturer dollars in GARRA for the moment, twenty-two cars worth of road racing talent are contesting DP as regulars with even more showing up at Daytona for the 24. Meanwhile the ALMS are scrambling to get car counts beyond an automatic podium for anybody who bothers to show up. This is particularly embarrassing for series stalwart Corvette Racing, who turn out world-beaters but haven’t been able strut their stuff for the fans at home against serious opposition. The decision-making process that led to the invitation of the Maserati MC12 remains shrouded in mystery but you don’t need to be a mind-reader to see that the non-arrival of Prodrive’s Ferraris and Astons for the bulk of the series created a problem for the promoter in GT1. Since the FIA has homologated the Maserati for the FIA GT championship run by Stephane Ratel it didn’t seem like a great leap to allow the car to run here. After all, Ratel has been having press conferences with the ACO leadership about combining international GT regulations across the board. IMSA technical staff was in Paris during the off-season working on the new GT1 and GT2 regulations. What’s the big deal? The what… The big deal, in my humble opinion, is this: Maserati is being presented in certain quarters as some kind of cottage industry underdog who just want to come and race. You know, Carlo, Bindo, Alfieri, Ettore, Mario, and Ernesto and their little machine shop in Bologna. The triumphant return of the tortellini-twisters who last won Sebring with Juan Manuel Fangio in 1957. What’s not to like? Latin connections go over big in Florida, and everybody loves Italian cottage industry. It’s even got an atmo V-12 to make-a da beautiful music. A car from a nation of artisans pressing olive oil, not big business like Karting with Bernie. Well, wrong ‘em boy-o. The Maserati is nothing but a badge-engineered Ferrari, and Ferrari is all about Formula One. This ain’t no friendly gesture from a few Bolognese brothers with a couple of lathes under the salamis curing in the rafters. This gift comes direct from Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, and if you ask me IMSA taking on the MC12 looks a whole lot like Trojans taking gifts from Greeks. Why is the good dottore so solicitous of IMSA’s car counts? Why does he want them to overlook the rulebook about silly widths and overhangs just this eensie teensy bit? I don’t like Oliver Stone movies all that much (except maybe The Doors) but you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to connect these dots. Ferrari just cut a $100 million deal with Bernie to stay in Formula One, another series with car count issues, through 2012. With tobacco money drying up in the European Community, Formula One car counts are going to be dependent on manufacturer involvement. Ford has already pulled out and is funding current and potential sportscar projects. The others have been making noises about going it alone and have used sportscars as a successful marketing platform in the past. The if… Why are the ACO so worried about one car competing in “exhibition” status? Look to Paul Stoddart’s little farce in the Victoria Supreme Court this month in Melbourne for the answer. He took advantage of Australia’s anti-trust laws to temporarily force the FIA to let him run his Formula One Minardis in 2004 specification. The European Commission also has anti-trust laws – remember that the GTR Organization caused the FIA millions in grief a few years ago over FOA’s restrictive licensing practices. The matter eventually settled more-or-less to the satisfaction of the FIA and FOA but it set some potentially dangerous precedents. Might an Italian court force homologation of the MC12 on anti- competitive grounds? They almost certainly might. The ACO aren’t interested in getting home-towned the way the FIA did by Stoddart in Melbourne when the LMES shows up at Monza. The original sales pitch of the ALMS was that conforming to an international formula would provide a stable marketing platform for competitors and more importantly, sponsors. Sportscar racing needs rules stability and an international calendar to attract entrants at the highest levels. This is the great appeal of GARRA and what the bickering is about in just about every other form of competition including Karting with Bernie. The ACO lost major manufacturer involvement at the turn of the 21st century over homologation tinkering by other sanctioning bodies, especially the FIA. IMSA was out in the wilderness then, SportsCar the ‘90’s equivalent of GARRA. The ACO remember that BMW, Daimler Benz, and Toyota were major players in endurance racing in the late’90’s and are all Karting with Bernie today. They left because rules were being enforced inconsistently and the lack of an international schedule. Commercial Way None of this is lost on dottore di Montezemolo. Take a look at the FIA GT website – it’s covered with Maserati logos. The MC12 got a homologation exception thanks to cubic Euros. Ironically many of these Euros came from the two billion dollar extortion payment by GM to get out of buying Fiat from di Montezemolo’s associates (remember National Lampoon’s “Buy This Magazine or We’ll Shoot this Dog” issue?). The Maserati MC12 is a joke car designed to be another Porsche GT-1 rules-bender. If a court allows a cheater to be homologated then manufacturers might not be so interested in going sportscar racing, especially if Schuey agrees to crash out of a few more races and give up the top step of the podium every once in a while. It’s a shame and I hope that I’m wrong, but I think that the ALMS are about to get slammed. Atherton and Mayer are in a panic about car counts after Daytona. The nice Trojan man offers them a “gift,” a beautiful V-12 full of heritage and Fangio references. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that the ACO have no intention of letting their homologation requirements get pitched out the window again through the meddling of other sanctioning bodies. Atherton and Mayer are right that nobody’s going to lose their license over Sebring. The ACO needs the entries. But if the future of sportscar endurance racing is with GT entrants, there is another series across town with a new GT class and a marquee endurance event early in the year in Florida. |
David Soares |
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| THEATER OF THE ABSURD Bill Oursler on the big countdown Perhaps we should call it the “Theater of the Absurd.” This week the American Le Mans Series will open its 2005 season with the Mobil 1 12 Hours of Sebring, perhaps the oldest, certainly one of the most prestigious of all the road racing events in the United States. Just once since it began in March of 1952 has Sebring not been held, that being in 1974 when the gas crisis was in full swing. Blogged At a time when most would expect the “buzz” to be about whom will emerge as the latest winner, the sole subject of conversation seems to center around the Maserati MC 12. This topic has been thoroughly covered in the past weeks by the motor sport media as if life itself depended on whether or not the Italian Super Car would run in the 12 Hours of Sebring and beyond. The fact is that the Maserati will participate because the ALMS not only wants it to, but because it needs it to. Using clever semantics, the sanctioning body for the ALMS, the International Motor Sport Association, likewise owned by Don Panoz, the man behind the series, is permitting the MC 12 to take the green flag as “its guest.” When is a rose not a rose? When the folks at Le Mans, from whom the ALMS leases its technical regulations decides to be stubborn and forget that Panoz expects his championship to be a money making enterprise. And if you give me… I'm willin' Basically, the dispute has come down to a contest of wills on the part of La Sarthe and its representatives who appear to care little about the financial health of the ALMS, at least not in the way that Panoz does. However, in a rare moment of sanity, the Automobile Club De L’Ouest has said it will “discuss” the Maserati’s future AFTER Sebring, this giving rise to suspicions that perhaps the ACO will forget about those discussions and allow everyone to move forward with their lives. Boss Hijack Now comes David Richards, boss of Prodrive, the team which has built and developed the two Aston Martins scheduled to make their inaugural appearance at the aging Central Florida track. Richards has announced that he will take action against IMSA if the MC12's are permitted to run, even as “guests” and not for points or money. That strikes me as peculiar to say the least. What Richards seems to propose is that the Federation Intenationale de L’Automobile, lift its listing of Sebring as a response to the illegality of the MC12’s collective presence. The problem with Richards’ argument is simple: while the ACO has not approved the Maserati, the FIA has. So how can the FIA be asked to lift its sanction of a race because a car, which it has approved for its own GT series is running at Sebring against the wishes of the ACO? In truth, it should be funny, yet it is deadly serious, for it is this kind of self-centered thinking which has brought sports car racing to the sorry state it currently finds itself in. Shaken and stirred… The ALMS is in a squeeze, what with the Grand Am championship gaining the entrants that the ALMS sorely needs. The other problem is that of trying to entertain its fans with what are, for the most part (the new Corvettes, the Aston Martins and the MC12s being the exceptions) last year’s cars. Hopefully there are better times ahead. At the moment, however, the ALMS needs all the help it can find, and that means the Maseratis because after Sebring, win or lose, Richards is taking his toys home to play in Europe and won’t be back until the final two events in the fall – if then. For years those in power like the FIA and the ACO have played their games, never once worrying about the overall future of the sport, but rather preferring to concentrate on their immediate agendas. The Maserati issue may seem petty, but so too does a minor skin cancer at first. IMSA and the ALMS have taken a firm stance, and I, for one, applaud them. The time has come to starting looking at the whole picture, not what’s the most self-serving. |
Bill Oursler |
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