Spirit of ALMS must continue

Coming up with a list of cracking American Le Mans Series races is easy. Whittling it down to the best 10 is much more difficult. Damn nigh impossible I'd say. So apologies to any driver, teams owner, engineer or mechanic who feels left out when they read my Top 10 for AUTOSPORT last week.

The short 15-season history of the ALMS provides an embarrassment of riches when it comes to classic racing. Which is why I was pulling my hair out as I put together my list of the best races ahead of the 149th and final ALMS race at Road Atlanta last weekend.

How could I leave out the thriller that was Petit Le Mans in 1999? Or the Sebring 12 Hours of 2001, or '09 for that matter?

And that's not counting the great battles that were fought out behind equally amazing action up at the front. It's easy to overlook thrilling racing in the classes when a pair of prototypes are going at it hammer and tongs for overall victory.

I'm thinking Mosport 2000 here. While Rinaldo Capello was holding off Jorg Muller at the front, a Chrysler Viper and a Chevrolet Corvette were duking it out for GTS honours. The battle between Karl Wendlinger and Andy Pilgrim was just as exciting and certainly more prolonged.

The last ever ALMS race gets underway at Road Atlanta last weekend © LAT

They all deserve to be on some kind of list, but unfortunately there wasn't room for them on mine.

American racing, by its stop-start nature, will always produce exciting battles, but the ALMS did seem somehow blessed. That's not to say that Grand-Am hasn't produced its fair share of classics.

My forays to Grand-Am have been limited to once-a-year reporting duties at the season-opening Daytona 24 Hours. I've seen some brilliant races at the self-styled 'World Center of Racing', but they have always seemed that little bit more contrived than those over the other side of the now-bridged US sportscar divide.

The final hour at Daytona 2009 enthralled me. Yet by the time the one-lap dash to the flag in 2011 came around, I was somewhat bored by the perpetual round of safety cars and wave-bys. I came to the conclusion that Daytona had become more a 24-hour game of cat-and-mouse than a real endurance race.

Of the races away from the Daytona International Speedway, I'm not qualified to talk. The reason for that is my absence from the Grand-Am paddocks.

Grand-Am was never such big news for AUTOSPORT as the ALMS was in its early years, and again when Porsche went up against Audi and was then joined by Acura in the second half of the noughties. The reason is two-fold: the ALMS was the world's best sportscar championship for many of its 15 years; and it had a relevance to what was going on over on our side of the Pond and, in particular, at the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Audi was a huge part of the ALMS © LAT

It wasn't just that the rules were the same (more or less). Many of the cars, teams and drivers were the same too.

The ALMS drew European eyes in a way that US sportscar racing had never done before. Series founder Don Panoz unashamedly borrowed the "build it and they will come" mantra from Field of Dreams. And come they did.

The series created by Panoz provided the arena that helped Audi make its name in sportscar racing. The history of the German manufacturer's ongoing adventure in the prototype division - and, in particular, that of its R8 contender of 2000-06 - is inextricably linked with the ALMS.

Other European brands took up the challenge, most notably Porsche with its LMP2 RS Spyder. Peugeot didn't even sell cars in the US, but it still understood the importance of its races, both in their own right and as preparation for the big prize in France. American race fans got to revel in the sight of both iterations of the 908 turbodiesel at Sebring and Petit even if many of them couldn't get remotely close to pronouncing Peugeot correctly.

The ALMS brought European manufacturers and teams to the US, but it also sent US entrants heading the other way. Cadillac is an obvious example, but let's not forget the smaller teams that made the trip, right down to plucky privateers like the Robertson husband and wife squad.

The United SportsCar series brings the ALMS and Grand-Am fields together © LAT

The ALMS is now gone, but the hope has to be that its spirit will live on. And the latest indications suggest that it will, because the United SportsCar Championship seems intent on maintaining the links of the ALMS with Le Mans and its organiser, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest.

Those of us who thought that the LMP2 category was going to be the poor relation to a brand of beefed-up Daytona Prototype under the new regime appear to have been proven wrong. They will not make up some kind of sub-class and, just as importantly, P2 machinery will race on unmolested by the US rulemakers. The same goes for what we call GTE: so-called GTLM cars will compete in the US in the same spec in which they will take up the challenge of the Circuit de la Sarthe each June.

This might sound strange, but it has been good to hear DP teams raising their concerns about the future and even a bit of whinging from their corner. It's not that I relish the sound of complaining voices (though I am used to them), but they prove that USC is a true merger and not the take-over - or perhaps walk-over - that many of us in Europe feared.

That's why I can't wait for the Daytona 24 Hours to come around. It will be the start of a new era, but I'm still to be convinced that the merger is of the same seismic importance as the creation of the ALMS. The shock waves from that event look set to be felt for many years to come in the USC.

And that has to be good news.