WEC needs prototype shake-up

LMP2 is in trouble, at least as far as the World Endurance Championship goes. That's the bad news. The good news is that series promoter the Automobile Club de l'Ouest understands that P2 has issues and is instigating a root-and-branch review of a class that is vital to the health of the championship.

The facts are there for all to see. A downtrend in entries - a drop to just seven ahead of this season - has been brought into sharp focus by a series of withdrawals that has meant there have been just four regular P2 entrants on the grid for the first two rounds of the WEC. And there appears to be a Sword of Damocles hanging over two of those.

You might ask who cares at a time when the WEC is in the spotlight for its manufacturer LMP1 entries and the exciting new technology that their latest contenders employ? Clearly the ACO cares and so should any true fan of sportscar racing.

The shortfall in P2 entries is ever more pertinent courtesy of those new rules. The efficiency-based regulations will, I am sure, eventually make P1 exclusively the realm of the manufacturers.

With the prospect of the manufacturers supplying customer cars - or even just drivetrains - some way beyond the horizon, a strong and vibrant P2 class is essential for the WEC. No one wants to see a prototype grid barely into double figures.

The problem is that P2 as it stands is not a financially viable proposition for a good old-fashioned race team. And by that, I mean a team that sets its budget, divides it by how many seats it has (three in the case of the WEC) and sells the drives. Hopefully, it'll have some sponsorship of its own to subsidise its deals, but that cannot be a given.

WEC doesn't lack LMP1 manufacturer teams, but behind them there are more problems © LAT

Scroll down the WEC P2 entry today (it won't take long), and you'll see that each of the teams has some kind of sugar daddy behind it. The same goes, in fact, for the two teams that haven't been at Silverstone and Spa.

They are a mixture of Russian banks (SMP Racing), wealthy private individuals (Nick Leventis at Strakka) and so-called development funds that we don't really understand (Millennium/Delta-ADR).

The nearest we have to a team selling its drives in an old-fashioned way is OAK Racing and its G-Drive Racing entry, but the French squad, of course, has the safety net of owner Jacques Nicolet's enthusiasm and aspirations and the funds with which he backs them up.

I'm not saying that sportscar racing doesn't need big-spending individuals with either driving or philanthropic ambitions. They've been part of the scene for as long as I've been following this branch of our sport, and the place of the wealthy amateur driver is these days enshrined in the regulations - P2 is a pro-am category, remember.

What I'm saying is that the secondary prototype class in a world championship cannot be founded on them.

The simple fact is that there aren't enough of them. Look at someone like Simon Dolan, a wealthy individual who chooses to race in the European Le Mans Series.

The reason isn't based solely on the fact that a budget for the ELMS and the Le Mans 24 Hours is just under half that for the WEC. Just as important is the time a world championship assault would take. The five flyaways at the end of the season each require the better part of a week away, something successful businessmen cannot afford.

P2 in the WEC is expensive. Teams will tell you that a budget for one car is €2.5million or just over £2m, but the solution to P2's problems is not to be found in attempts to reduce costs.

It is doubtful that much of a reduction could be made in an LMP2 budget for the WEC. The constructors are already selling their wares somewhere either side of break-even, and a tyre bill doesn't really go down when you mandate the use of fewer sets - the price per set goes up because the suppliers still need to meet their development and servicing costs.

The solution is to be found not in the technical regulations, but in the sporting regulations. The pro-am philosophy isn't working in the WEC, partly because there aren't enough wealthy amateurs to go round and partly because the class isn't attractive enough to aspiring young drivers contemplating jumping off the single-seater ladder.

Conway got himself on manufacturers' shopping lists by impressing in LMP2 © XPB

P2 should be the natural choice for a driver when he comes to the realisation that yet another year of GP2 isn't going to get him to Formula 1 (even if he wins the title, it seems these days) and that he might have a future as a paid professional in sportscar racing.

The problem is that right now those kind of drivers won't want to stump up a similar amount of cash as they are paying for a subsidised ride in GP2 for a season in the WEC.

Part of the reason, it seems, is that they are frightened off by the image of P2 as a pro-am category. They are wary of spending €800,000 of their own or a sponsor's money on a drive when their chances of success are hugely dependent on the skills of the amateur driver in the car.

That's why fully-professional driver line-ups need to be allowed in P2. That would give the category a new appeal to the very drivers it should be attracting, those looking to do as Mike Conway has done: use the category as a springboard to a factory deal (albeit a testing and reserve role with Toyota).

Not that a fully-pro P2 in the WEC would be to the exclusion of amateurs. There will always be ambitious gentlemen racers ready to compete at every level of sportscar racing. Don't forget that Leventis has taken his Strakka Racing team into P1 on two occasions in the past.

There are problems with this idea, not least how the new-look class would sit alongside P2 in the ELMS, a championship in which the pro-am format is working.

LMP2 machinery from the European series is an important constituent of the Le Mans grid, and would there be such a ready queue of ELMS teams wanting to do the 24 Hours if they were up against all-pro cars?

Allowing three pros in a P2 car might be regarded as a high-risk strategy should the ACO opt to go down that route. I'm not sure there is an alternative apart from doing nothing. And that would mean P2 remaining in the doldrums, or worse.