Why the WEC is right to drop its hangover cure

The winter-series format introduced for this season's World Endurance Championship has ended up as collateral damage against motorsport's struggles in the world health crisis.

The rejig of the current campaign has led to its abandonment for the ninth season of the reborn series. We'll now be talking about the 2021 WEC and not the 2020/21 WEC, and I can't say I'm disappointed.

I was never convinced about the idea of running the championship across two calendar years and climaxing with the Le Mans 24 Hours. It was philosophically ill-founded to my mind. But abandoning the winter-series format right now is the correct decision on every front. It makes sense as the WEC looks to complete its present campaign and it makes sense, too, as the series looks to the future.

Once Le Mans was put back to the third weekend of September, two weeks after the intended start of the 2020/21 campaign at Silverstone, the idea of a winter series looked shaky. When the WEC decided that it wanted to maintain the 2019/20 schedule at eight races, it was nigh-on impossible.

Scheduling more than one race before Le Mans wasn't realistic given that no one knows right now when the resumption of motorsport will come. The rescheduled Spa round on August 15, as WEC boss Gerard Neveu has acknowledged, has to be at risk if the effects of the coronavirus pandemic linger on. The idea of fitting in two races was a non-starter.

That meant slotting in a round after Le Mans. And what the WEC has done is to effectively bring forward Bahrain's round of the 2020/21 series scheduled for the first weekend of December and hang it on the end of the current schedule on November 21. So that was the end of the winter series.

We're now all but certain to begin the 2021 WEC campaign at Sebring next March. That makes sense given that a new breed of machinery in the LM Hypercars is due to come on stream at the start of the coming season.

Simply placing Le Mans at the end of the calendar wasn't the answer to the WEC's hangover problem

Before the world was paralysed by the current crisis, it seemed that only Toyota had a chance of being ready with its new machine, and by the skin of its teeth. No one was expecting its likely rivals, Glickenhaus and ByKolles, to make it for Silverstone on September 5.

A seven-month delay to the start of the new campaign offers the chance that Toyota will have some opposition beyond some old LMP1 cars when the new era for the WEC gets underway.

Switching to a conventional calendar will also bring the WEC into line with the IMSA SportsCar Championship. That's important given that the new LMDh category will allow the same cars are bidding for victory in North America to compete in the WEC and at Le Mans against the LMH contenders.

It makes sense to bring the introduction of these cars, which will replace the current IMSA Daytona Prototype international machinery, into line across the two series.

A September 2021 kick-off for the new category in the WEC was too early. Given that we don't have any solid rules as yet, it was surely wishful to think that multiple manufacturers would be ready in time, even before the world was plunged into crisis.

The winter-series wasn't a new idea when it was announced in September 2017: it was revived as part of the reaction to Porsche's withdrawal from LMP1 that summer.

The 2018/19 SuperSeason, incorporating two editions of Le Mans, was part of the rescue package put in place by the WEC and series promoter the Automobile Club de l'Ouest and a neat way of segueing into a campaign beginning in September and finishing in June with the big one in France.

The idea was to rid the WEC of the hangover that it faced each season in the wake of an event that dwarfs all others on the schedule in terms of prestige, importance and media attention. The WEC had a tendency to be anti-climatic after its biggest race, something not helped by a summer break that in 2015 stretched all the way to the second half of September, nor the double points on offer.

Think back to 2016, when Porsche trio Neel Jani, Romain Dumas and Marc Lieb claimed the big 50-point haul at the 24 Hours. They then went on to seal the title without finishing better than fourth in any of the remaining races.

But simply placing Le Mans at the end of the calendar wasn't the answer to the WEC's hangover problem. It was a bit like seeing an ad in a newspaper for a magical cure to the morning-after malaise of excessive alcohol consumption, sending off your money and getting a piece of paper back by return of post with the simple words 'Stop Drinking' written large upon it.

Making the most important event on the schedule the finale surely added to that importance and, by definition, diminished the standing of the other races.

We'll never know for sure now that Le Mans isn't the final round of the one and only WEC winter series, but I believe the idea was having the opposite to the intended effect.

What the WEC has needed since its rebirth back in 2012 is more events, by which I mean big races with their own identities that are more than just rounds of a championship. Achieving that isn't the work of a moment, but my idea has always been for some longer races with more than the regular number of points on offer.

The WEC needs to build on the momentum of its biggest race, not let it dribble away over weeks or months of inactivity

That's why I'm not complaining about the prospect of the 2021 WEC starting at Sebring next March. Sure the 1000-mile race isn't the main event — that's the Sebring 12 Hours IMSA round, of course — but it's part of an amazing package that gets a monster crowd and is a constant on the world sportscar calendar. And there are extra points on offer, too, for a race capped at eight hours.

The Bahrain races, both the fixture last December and the forthcoming one in November, are also of eight hours' duration, so the WEC is trying to mix it up a bit. The experiment with four-hour races has been dropped, so how about a pair of three-hour races somewhere? Maybe that could be part of the "reset" Neveu has talked about as the championship moves forward in uncertain times.

What I would urge, however, is that stupid summer break post-Le Mans disappears. The WEC needs to build on the momentum of its biggest race, not let it dribble away over weeks or months of inactivity.

Everyone knows that the best cure for a hangover is to get up and get going rather than loitering in bed.