All too often we forget that there is more than one way of doing things. Ever since the traumatic times of the late 1990s, the road-racing segment of the motorsport industry has been debating whether there is enough interest for two professional sanctioning bodies.
Even now, long after Andy Evans and his disastrous tenure as the owner of the International Motor Sports Ass’n and the equally shaky revival by the Sports Car Club of America of its United States Road Racing Championship, the debate continues.
Still, today there are unrealistic calls for the IMSA-sanctioned American Le Mans Series and its opposite number, Grand American’s Rolex Sports Car tour, to merge into a single entity. No amount of seemingly irrefutable logic has been capable of dampening the on-going enthusiasm for a “rapprochement” between ALMS and Grand Am.
Well, fellows, forget it. As they say, “It ain’t gonna happen.”
The truth is that the approaches each have taken to the criteria by which they base their businesses are so different that merging is not feasible. Yet, there is a certain degree of validity to the discussion of the ultimate survivability of this relatively small segment of the industry in its present state.
There are negatives for both series, and some are serious enough to warrant attention. In Rolex’s case, it is the inability to engender a sense of respect, much less interest from the fan base that presumably is its intended audience. As for ALMS, whose product approached perfection in terms of excitement and fan interest, there is a rules issue with the Le Mans organizers whose regulations it uses.
Perhaps more important than even these issues, are the questions of costs. The fact of the matter is, that while there is a notion that racing in the Rolex is significantly less expensive than running in the ALMS, the monetary differential is not as great as one might expect. Clearly the limitations Grand Am has placed on technology have helped contain budgets. However, the bulk of the funding necessary to race in either championship goes into overhead and transportation, not capital expenditures.
Airlines don’t differentiate in terms of ticket prices between those flying to Grand Am races and those traveling to ALMS events. Likewise neither do hotels, restaurants, or oil companies. Similarly, the folks who work in the shops behind the scene, whether those shops belong to the race teams themselves, or to the manufacturers producing the cars, engines and spare parts for those teams, get paid comparable salaries for what they do, regardless of whether its for the Grand Am or the ALMS.
As John Vanderbilt once said, “If you have to ask how much, then probably you can’t afford it.” And these days the “how much” keeps going up no matter what the two sanctioning bodies try to do to control costs, this leading to the question of how long and how many will continue to indulge themselves on what basically is a hobby.
The thought process that has determined the shape of Grand Am was to appeal to those who didn’t want to “throw away” their money trying to beat manufacturers such as Audi, which were willing to spend not millions, but hundreds of millions on winning. In those terms, the Rolex tour in general and its Daytona Prototype division in particular, has been incredibly successful, a fact evinced by any comparison in terms of the car counts of each series.
On the other hand, the ALMS has achieved a relevancy that its counterpart still searches for. Indeed, having Audi, Acura and Porsche all fielding official, or semi-official entries in the ALMS has raised the bar greatly in the “who cares” factor among fans.
Yet, if history is to be believed, basing one’s championship on  a continuing manufacturer-based participation, leads ultimately to serious long term problems because those manufacturers all want a return on their investments, something that in an exercise where there are winners and losers, is not always possible or practical.
Grand Am has eschewed official manufacturer involvement in terms of entries, and has created an exciting product that few, other than the participants care about. ALMS has an equally exciting product that people do take an interest in, but is based on the vagaries of folks largely interested in seeing their profit and loss statements contain more black ink than red.
Neither approach is without inherent problems, and therefore neither is perfect. The question is whether or not in the end can those espousing them can make them work in the longterm.
Whatever happens, one has to applaud the fact that there are two differing ideas in a sport that all too often in the past has been hidebound when considering the future. In the meantime, it is the fan who will benefit from the choice, and that is something to truly celebrate.