Is WEC's new hypercar shift panic or pragmatism?

So, hypercars - true hypercars built for the road - are going to be allowed to race for outright victory at the Le Mans 24 Hours and in the World Endurance Championship.

An Aston Martin Valkyrie slugging it out with some kind of Ferrari and maybe the latest Koenigsegg nutter bastard appears on first thought to be a mouth-watering prospect.

But the idea of them going up against pure-bred racing cars built to the hypercar concept prototype rules published back in December... well, I can't make up my mind on that one.

That's where the confusion lies in last week's announcement from the FIA World Motor Sport Council that genuine hypercars are going to be incorporated into the new top category of the WEC due to come into force for the 2020/21 season.

The hypercar concept was always intended to be a prototype category. The rulemakers have been at pains to stress that point over the past year or so in the face of continual misinterpretation from some less-informed quarters. The category calls for lookalikes rather than the real thing.

Now it's been thrown open in what might charitably be called a pragmatic move on the part of the FIA and WEC promoter the Automobile Club de l'Ouest. A better description might be a panic reaction to the fact that no major manufacturer has made a firm commitment to a category that's now less than 18 months from going live.

Manufacturers came knocking at the WEC's door questioning the €20million a season budgets projected by the rulemakers for the new regulations. An alternative, perhaps cheaper, way forward was suggested, and the WEC, the FIA and the ACO have acquiesced. That's presumably because one or more manufacturer has said that it is ready to turn up with a genuine hypercar some time during the 2020/21 season.

You might argue that the rulemakers didn't have a choice given that the clock was ticking. But the latest move has triggered the stopwatch again. There might have been an announcement last week that real hypercars will be part of the new category, but how they are going to be incorporated alongside proper racing cars has yet to be revealed. I doubt the plan is at the stage where it can be.

The danger is that we will end up in the same kind of sorry mess that we are having to endure in the current WEC season

The big question is how fast can a hypercar go around the Circuit de la Sarthe? The long, eight-and-half-mile Le Mans lap is the reference when it comes to writing the WEC rulebook, and I would question whether a road-based car could hit the 3m24s-3m25s qualifying lap time that the rulemakers have targeted for LMP1's successor.

So where does that leave the original hypercar concept rules? Needing more tweaks and a second downscaling of the performance targets - down from the original 3m20s lap - is the answer.

But the whole thing is going to need something else. And it goes by that dreaded name 'Balance of Performance'. BoP is surely going to be part of the landscape when LMP1 is replaced in the WEC from 2020/21.

I don't see how it can be avoided. For a start, different shapes and sizes of hypercar will need to be balanced, and then they have to be aligned with the prototypes, or rather the other way around.

The BoP is probably going to have to balance different technologies. The hypercar prototypes will have front-axle hybrid systems as mandated in the rulebook, the hypercar road cars probably won't. And will all of the hypercars actually be hybrids? The McLaren Senna isn't, for example.

The problems that's going to cause are plain to see in the WEC today. The danger is that we'll end up in the same kind of sorry mess that we are having to endure in the current 2018/19 superseason as the rulemakers battle to balance the Toyota TS050 HYBRIDs with the non-hybrid privateer LMP1 machinery.

They have borrowed the Equivalence of Technology terminology from their efforts to balance petrol and turbodiesel machines of different hybrid capacities in the days of Toyota versus Audi versus Porsche. The reality is that it's BoP under a different name.

And it isn't really working. The benefits that come with four-wheel drive are immense, particularly in the cut and thrust of racing. Toyota shows that every time out. It's at the heart of the problems LMP1 is enduring today.

Hypercars or super sportscars, call them what you will, for the most part have their hybrid systems on the rear axle. So the problem of balancing four and two-wheel-drive machinery isn't going to go away in 2020/21.

Then there's the new safety rules that are part of the hypercar concept prototype regulations. Crash test loads are up, and additional space is being mandated around the driver's head and legs. Will a road car that's probably already designed have to comply with these new requirements? That's another unanswered question.

And there's another question mark. We don't know how LMP2 will fit into the equation.

The new breed of LMP2s introduced at the start of 2017 can match the hypercar prototype lap time target at Le Mans - last year's LMP2 pole was a high 3m24s - so they were going to have to be slowed anyway to maintain what over in America they call 'class separation'. But if a road-going hypercar can only do 3m30s, and that's a figure I've heard one manufacturer is touting around, then they are going to have to be made a whole lot slower.

The neat thing about the hypercar concept prototype rules as they stand - or should I say stood? - is that they should create a level playing field without recourse to BoP. By laying down maximum downforce and minimum drag figures, and mandating strict limits on engine power and weight distribution, the new rules appeared to be inclusive at the same time as keeping costs down.

It somehow feels as though we are almost back where we started

And to flatten out any differences, there is a system of success ballast. Not a traditional one where the amount of lead bolted in the car goes up and down with results, but a cumulative one based on championship points scored, though the weight comes off for the Le Mans series finale.

The hypercar concept prototype rules looked like a clever solution to the quandary that has faced LMP1 since the start of what I call the high-tech era, which began with the arrival of the turbodiesels in the second half of the 2000s and continued when the hybrids came on stream on the rebirth of the WEC in 2012. And that's how to keep costs under control and give the privateers a fighting chance.

There has been, of course, scepticism about the €20million budget projection. There are people out there who think a competitive car is doable for the kind of figures the WEC are talking about - at least one interested independent has told me that. I remain doubtful, and so do many of the manufacturers who were around the table as the hypercar prototype rules were formulated.

We know that a group of them met with the rulemakers last month to discuss this very point last month. Aston Martin (together with its development partner in the Valkyrie project, Red Bull Advanced Technologies), McLaren and Ferrari were all there.

We can't know the details of the discussions, but every indication points to Aston making a push to be allowed to race a hypercar proper. I'm not convinced that McLaren wants to compete with the Senna, nor Ferrari with the successor to the LaFerrari. Aston, of course, isn't admitting that it wants to come with the Valkyrie, or perhaps the 'son of Valkyrie' AM-RB 003, only saying that it remains "fully engaged in the rule-making process".

The problem is that this process is still ongoing with the start of the new category in sight. Perhaps the real hypercar route was one the rulemakers should have gone down from the very start, but my understanding is that it was thrown out very early in the day last spring. It somehow feels as though we are almost back where we started.

We don't have rules for the real hypercars, nor the means by which they will be equated with the not so real ones, the prototypes. It appears to me as though we're going to end up once again with a kind of two-tier top category, something that the hypercar concept rules were meant to do away with.

It will then be up to the rulemakers, once again, to balance everything. And I'm dreading that.