The classic debate revived by Britain's overlooked 2020 champion

It's a question I've asked before. Does winning the World Endurance Championship make up for not winning the Le Mans 24 Hours? A variation on the theme is to inquire about what means the most, claiming the championship or taking victory in the big race in France at its centre?

I struggled to get an answer when I put the first version to Mike Conway the day after he'd wrapped up the 2019/20 WEC crown together with Toyota team-mates Kamui Kobayashi and Jose Maria Lopez in Bahrain last Saturday. He procrastinated at first, but eventually said that he'd "take the world championship over Le Mans", a race he has come so close to winning in the past.

I'm not so much talking about this year, rather 2019 when he, Kobayashi and Lopez had victory ripped from their grasp with an hour to go courtesy of a bit of dodgy wiring.

PLUS: How the 'moral winners' lost Le Mans

And then there was 2017, when an orange-suited driver looking for all the world like a marshal waved Kobayashi through a red light at the end of the pit lane. That set in motion a sequence of events that almost certainly deprived Conway, Kobayashi and Stephane Sarrazin of the win.

Mike pointed out that a championship is fought out over multiple races, which in the case of the WEC are of different durations. The 2019/20 campaign included six and eight-hour rounds, as well as the 24 Hours, and next season, fingers crossed, will again encompass the 1000-miler at Sebring as it did in 2018/19.

Winning any title is about performing weekend in and weekend out. Put it this way, you're less likely to fluke your way to a championship victory than in one of its component parts.

Harder to win maybe, but is the championship more important than Le Mans? That is perhaps the pertinent question and the more difficult one to answer.

Le Mans has a worldwide reach like very few individual motor races. It's up there with the Indy 500 and the Monaco Grand Prix, which is why they come together to form the unofficial triple crown of motorsport that Fernando Alonso is — or perhaps was — so desperate to complete.

The French enduro draws eyes from around the globe and a crowd of more than a quarter of a million. It has an atmosphere like no other race in the world - just ask the superannuated Formula 1 stars who have pitched up at the 24 Hours in recent years. Only when they got there and breathed it all in did they understand what the fuss was all about.

The rest of the WEC attracts, for the most part, little in the way of crowds, or coverage from the non-specialist media. As I have said before, its races are merely rounds of a championship rather than events in themselves. That's discounting the WEC race on the bill of the Sebring 12 Hours, of course.

The words 'world champion' sound good for a start and the FIA doesn't hand out that title like sweeties

Then there's the fact that the WEC is a Johnny-come-lately in comparison with Le Mans. The current incarnation of what can loosely be called the world sportscar championship started as recently as 2012. A drivers' title was only awarded in the original version from 1981. It began in 1953 and for its first 28 years only manufacturers got the chance to call themselves world champions at the end of the season. Le Mans, on the other hand, is only a few years off celebrating its centenary, having run for the first time in 1923.

Trot down to your local high street and ask a few random passersby — while maintaining social distancing, of course — and some of them will know about Le Mans. (While staying on the theme of our troubled times, the nurse who undertook my pre-Le Mans COVID test in September knew all about the race.) Throw in the three-letter acronym WEC, and you'll probably draw a blank. Spell it out for them, and they'd probably be none the wiser, though they might get the gist of what it's all about.

But for a driver to be able to call himself a world champion means something.

I remember putting the second version of my question to Loic Duval after he'd sealed the 2013 WEC title with Tom Kristensen and Allan McNish in the same year that they triumphed at Le Mans. He was very much of the opinion that the French enduro was the more important of his achievements that season.

But I happened to ask a similar question while chatting just a few months ago to Kristensen, a driver who didn't have a world title to chase for the majority of his sportscar career. He wasn't willing to pick one over the other, but he expressed the opinion that the WEC crown was significant in what he called the "wider perspective". I get what he means.

The words world champion sound good for a start and the FIA doesn't hand out that title like sweeties. But in terms of endurance racing, the fact that there is a world championship makes success in the discipline relatable to F1, which even I as a dyed-in-the-wool sportscar fan recognise is the pre-eminent form of motorsport around the globe.

People understand that in F1 drivers chase a world championship. No one thinks that Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen or whoever sets out at the start of the season with the primary objective of winning the Monaco GP. The man in the street who doesn't know what Le Mans is probably does understand the concept of being world champion.

So I get Mike's hesitation on being asked to choose between the title and victory in the 'big one'. There are arguments both ways, as I have explained.

But he's undoubtedly correct when he says the championship is harder to win. You don't luck into one. But you can luck out of a Le Mans victory, as Mike, Kamui and Jose Maria have found out. So I hope they get a win in the big race soon so they don't have to answer cheeky questions from the likes of me.