oreca battle

Why are some people starting to say that there's a declining interest in Motorsport, when some fan bases seem as healthy as ever?

The decline is very real. As costs have risen in all types of motorsports, most race classes have turned into some form of spec class, in which all cars are more or less the same, sometimes allowing for minor tweaks by each team, other times rigidly specifying only part of the car (such as IndyCar, where every team uses the exact same Italian-designed and built Dallara DW12 car, but can choose between Chevrolet and Honda engines; however, these are factory direct engines, meaning that teams cannot change anything physical about them, only setup minor things such as engine mappings). Also note that the number 12 is the year the car was designed: yes, IndyCar currently uses a 10 years old base design, slightly modified each year to increase safety and/or reduce costs, but not any significant design change. Simply because teams can barely afford to buy the slightly updated versions; they would ran away in panic if brand new designs were developed every year… The lone exception is F1, where each team is allowed to develop their own car and engine… but only so much: in the name of cost control, when F1 adopted hybrid engines in 2014, a token development system was also implemented, severely limiting the upgrades teams could do to their designs after they had been approved by F1. Even worse, the hybrid engine spec was written by one of the competing teams (Mercedes), which combined with the token system was grossly unfair to the others, and among other things caused the abysmal performance of the Honda powered cars until recently (Honda planned their return to F1 when only internal combustion engines were used) Add the inordinate amount of races decided not by plain track results but by steward decisions, plus the fact they routinely favor one team (if you know F1 you know who they are), so all too often, the on track performance is not reflected in the final results… plus the fact that modern F1 cars are pretty twitchy, losing control or breaking at the slightest contact, which pretty much eliminates the possibility of clean, long wheel to wheel fights. Like many other old schoolers, my fondest memory of great F1 racing dates back to the 1979 French GP, where Gilles Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux battled for 2nd place (not even overall win!) for a couple laps, banging wheels multiple times, coming in and out of the track, yet both finished without much trouble, and after the end had a hearty hug celebrating their battle: reminiscing over the fact, one of the F1 broadcasters in Spanish sneered that today, they would probably be arrested upon crossing the finish line and given a race ban for life. Back to other race classes, the situation in the US is anything but healthy. NASCAR is bleeding money like crazy. Whether it is due to their spec class mentality (cars are really fiberglass clad silhouettes); even the headlights and grilles are painted, while they don’t even care about making the sides and rear of the cars remotely similar to the model they are supposed to represent. Or due to slow cultural changes (even for Southern standards, the good ole boy types like Richard Petty are rather ,passe,). Be that as it may, NASCAR is struggling to maintain their fan base. IndyCar is far worse: for years, the class was on assisted respiration thanks to money earned during the Indy 500 and distributed to all teams by Tony Hulman (owner of Indy), but that has stopped too, so new owner Roger Penske is trying to find a viable form of supporting all the teams while not losing money. The telltale is that very few cars have a steady sponsor for an entire season -most change from race to race, as their sponsors are not willing to pony up enough money for the full year. And I haven’t yet mentioned the ugliest case of decadence: Sports cars, formerly known as Sport Prototypes or GT, Le Mans prototypes or GT, and today with the big sounding “Hypercar” name… despite the fact that only one team (Toyota) fields something vaguely resembling of what the Hypercar class was supposed to be. To drum up some interest, organizers came up a while ago with the despicable “Balance of Performance” concept, initially only applicable to the GT classes (GT Le Mans, or Pro, and GT “Amateur”); basically, you let all competitors run lap times as fast as possible (according to them…), you compare said lap times and tweak the regulations to try to ensure all cars would be closely matched. For example, if you run a turbo engine and look slower than the competitors you might be allowed a fraction of a bar extra overpressure. And if your car is normally aspirated, you would be allowed to use a larger restrictor plate. In a perfect world of honorable competitors, the benchmark lap times would truly be as quick as possible, with no sandbagging. Yeah, right. In 2016, Ford returned to Le Mans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their first overall victory with the GT40. Except this time they competed in the GTLM class… since their Ford GT car was brand new, it was judged by how it performed in their first outings, which was painfully slow. Therefore, it was allowed a series of improvements, as per the BoP concept, with the intent to make them a close match to the competition (Porsche 911, Chevrolet Corvette and Ferrari F488). The day of the race, the Fords were spectacular… still, it took a number of dirty cross accusations and obscure steward decisions (just like cousin F1!) to decide the win for one of the Fords vs. a Ferrari. Amazingly, a lot of fans loved the “close racing”; how could it not be close if the organizers ,force, all cars to run roughly similar lap times? Nowadays the ugly idea extended to the top class, Le Mans Hypercars. After Audi and Porsche quit the top class (then known as LMP1), Toyota was left with the only top tech car able to win the overall classifications, and have been doing so pretty much on every race. Organizers claimed that a lot of manufacturers were going to enter the Hypercar class: if you saw them, please let me know… to avoid the embasrrasment of having only one team racing in the top class, a few clearly inferior cars have been “repurposed” as sorta kinda Hypercars. Yet there still is an issue: the Toyota uses top notch hybrid technology, like the Porsches and Audis used to, while the weak competitors (like the former Rebellion - Oreca now called Alpine A480, that is, a LMP1 chassis which was never competitive with a bulged up LMP2 engine) use internal combustion engines only. To attempt to reduce the obvious lameness of such a disparity, the Toyotas are charged with all sorts of performance limiting, but of course, it can’t get bad enough that the only decent team quits, so everybody knows that, at the end of the day, Toyota will win, even if the Alpine ran close for a little while. Just one non-honorable mention for the “eco friendly” Formula E, a dumpster of not-good-enoughs for F1 and former F1 drivers who are not wanted in IndyCar. Sorry the answer took so long. But in summary, yes there is a decline. And there doesn’t seem to be any good ideas which could attract rational fans; in my book, made up rivalries, meddling stewards and artificial “equalization” rules are not the way to go.