Why the WEC's bombshells won't fix its main problem

Two editions of the Le Mans 24 Hours in one season and two Sebrings in one weekend. Those were the twin bombshells that the World Endurance Championship dropped last weekend as it outlined a vision for a brave new world of a winter season climaxing at the Le Mans 24 Hours each year.

The WEC needed a good news day in the wake of the uncertainty created by Porsche's announcement of its withdrawal from LMP1 at the end of this season. A move to a winter schedule straddling two calendar years and a 12-hour race at Sebring straight after the 'real' Sebring 12 Hours provided that. And the term 'superseason' to describe a transition period through Le Mans in 2018 and '19 and on into the new format was always going to grab the headlines.

The winter format could be the perfect cure for the Le Mans hangover that blights the WEC every year after its biggest race of the season. And who wouldn't want the series to race at the home of US sportscar racing in front of a ready-made crowd - and on a truly great circuit?

But a radical revision of the calendar doesn't address the real problem that the WEC is facing right now. And that's a decline in the factory entry in LMP1 in particular, and a lack of cars in the top category in general.

The WEC and series promoter the Automobile Club de l'Ouest didn't ignore this issue. The plan for the superseason and the inaugural winter series in 2019/20 is to give privateer P1s the same chance to win as the factories. Or should I say 'factory' - and even that's presuming Toyota will be back. (And if it wants to come back, it must sign up for the full superseason.)

And why should we presume that? Is it realistic to expect a manufacturer spending somewhere in the region of €100 million to return in the knowledge that is going to have a fight on its hands to beat privateers spending less than a fifth of that on their non-hybrid cars? Would the board of Toyota - or any other major manufacturer for that matter - be ready to sign off such a programme?

It's bad enough for a manufacturer to be beaten by a privateer, worse still if that independent is racing a car devoid of the technological gizmos that a brand such as Toyota wants to trumpet. I've banged on incessantly about the need for cars makers to have message to sell when they go motor racing, so a twin-hybrid being vanquished by a conventional car would probably be the ultimate negative message.

The ACO is between a rock and a hard place right now as it strives to shore up the LMP1 category in the wake of Audi's departure last year and Porsche's announcement that it would be following suit at the end of this season. It needs manufacturers and it also needs a big influx of cars, and that means privateers. It must do everything possible to attract back the independents, who have a rich history in sportscar racing, but I'm not sure that making the position of the only remaining factory more or less untenable is the right way forward.

There remains a very real possibility that there will no manufacturers in LMP1 next year. That has to be a worry - more for the WEC than for Le Mans

The WEC needs to hang on to Toyota in the short term and ensure that it stays around in the long term.

If the Japanese manufacturer departs ahead of the superseason, what chance will there be of getting it back for 2020/21, when new P1 regulations for factories running hybrid cars - different to the ones announced this June - will come into force?

The WEC needs the halo provided by manufacturers, which brings me to another disappointment from last weekend's announcement. The plan for a qualifying sprint race for GTE Pro cars has been shelved, at least through to the end of the superseason. That has to be wrong.

The GTE Pro class should be one of the selling points of the next year's WEC - sorry, the 2018/19 WEC - because BMW is joining an already thrilling battle between the four manufacturers competing in the series at the moment. Everything possible needs to be done to raise the profile of that fight, and a made-for-TV qualifying race on a Saturday before the regular six-hour races seemed to me to be a perfect way of doing that.

The WEC is saying that it would be wrong to introduce a GTE Pro qualifying sprint at a time when it's trying to ensure that the costs of the eight-race superseason remain comparable with the current nine-event annual schedule. There might be some logic to that, but I have to side with the GTE manufacturers who feel that they have been neglected by the ACO's attempts to ensure that the LMP1 class survives.

There are some positive things to come out of that process. The ACO is insistent that it will remain committed to high-performance prototypes incorporating hybrid and other future technologies as it once more gets around the table with the FIA and potential entrants to discuss revised rules for 2020/21.

And when questioned about the possibility of the adoption of something akin to the LMP2-based Daytona Prototype international rules introduced for this year for the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America, WEC boss Gerard Neveu disparagingly invoked the term 'DIY'.

Some believe that inviting DPis, perhaps only to Le Mans, could provide a short-term solution to the shortfall in manufacturers. Neveu said it would be disrespectful to Toyota and the privateers who are working on projects, the likes of SMP Racing/BR Engineering and Ginetta Cars, to start looking in that direction. Don't forget that it announced a period of rules stability for the privateers up to the end of the 2021 season at Le Mans last year.

On the other hand, a privateer LMP1 monocoque is built to the same safety standards as as a P2 tub. The ACO hasn't ruled out the possibility of a common platform for a new breed of factory P1s and the DPis.

There remains a very real possibility that there will be no manufacturers in P1 next year for the reasons explained above. That has to be a worry, more for the WEC than for Le Mans.

The 24 Hours has survived years when there have been no factories at the front of the grid, and it has always come again as a major event. It is a big enough race to weather the down years. The problem is that I suspect the world championship, still only six years on from its rebirth in 2012, cannot.

There should be a queue of independents ready to face the challenge of Le Mans, but how many of them will want to trail around the globe to compete in the full WEC? Could privateers provide a decent-sized class at the front of the field? I worry about the answers to those questions.

That's why the WEC can't afford to alienate Toyota and needs to go beyond the call of duty to promote GTE Pro. A winter series is probably a clever move and I love the idea of a WEC race again at Sebring, scene of the very first world championship sportscar event back in 1953, but the race needs to be befitting of its surroundings.

Is the world going to get excited about such an event if it is fought out by a smattering of privateers?