Judge LMP1 on its glorious high not its fall

Silverstone this weekend isn't the end of an era, but it is the beginning of the end. It's the start of the last season for the LMP1 class, and I'll be shedding a tear or two over the course of the division's farewell tour through the 2019/20 World Endurance Championship.

It's not that I'm uninspired by the prospect of what's to follow in a year's time, when a new breed of top-flight sportscar comes on stream with the WEC's hypercar category. I'm hoping for a run of announcements from manufacturers big and small over the next 12 months to make me ever more enthusiastic.

Rather, I will be sad because I'll forever be casting my mind back to the good times of LMP1 in all its pomp and glory. You never know what you've got until it's gone, and it has gone now with Toyota left as the only manufacturer standing. But, boy, did we have something special.

The time I'm talking about is what I call the high-tech era of LMP1. It kicked off in 2006 when Audi started racing the R10 turbodiesel, got going the following season when Peugeot followed suit with the 908 and reached a crescendo soon after the relaunch of world championship sportscar racing in '12.

We had Audi versus Toyota versus Porsche over three glorious seasons in 2014-16, a trio big-spending manufacturers slugging it out with some amazing hybrid machinery. The cars were breathtaking to watch - frightening even - and put on one hell of a show.

This high-tech era produced two of the greatest ever editions of the Le Mans 24 Hours, the Audi versus Peugeot battles of 2008 (pictured above) and '11. Audi's against-the-odds triumph in the first of those years stands as the best ever in my mind, but the ultra-close finish three years later is right up there.

The years when we had three manufacturers in the WEC didn't produce quite such an outstanding Le Mans, more's the pity, but they did deliver amazing racing on a regular basis. And if they didn't, you could just sit back and marvel at the cars. Or better still get out trackside and watch 'em.

It was what motor racing is meant to be. There was a rulebook, engineers and aerodynamicists read it, and designed and built a car and went racing

It was a heady time for sportscar racing. I contend that the 10 years between 2008 (season two for Peugeot) and '17 (Porsche's final campaign) are among the greatest in the history of the branch of motorsport that I've been writing about for more than a quarter of a century.

Although the era predated the rebirth of the WEC, Audi and Peugeot did slug it out on different continents. They went head to head at the big enduros on the American Le Mans Series calendar, and then came the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, the forerunner to the world series. That meant more fantastic racing between those two.

The 2009 Sebring 12 Hours (pictured above) is one of their battles that stands out in my mind. Audi versus Porsche at Silverstone '16 is another one on my all-time favourites list, and perhaps yours too if you were there in Northamptonshire. You might remember the '17 race, another cracker, as well.

And the LMP1 big guns did it all unencumbered by Balance of Performance, success handicaps or any other artificial means. There was Equivalence of Technology in the WEC years, of course, but back in those days it did what it said on the tin.

It equated distinct technologies at a time when we had turbodiesels and petrol-powered machinery and cars with different hybrid concepts. It wasn't the EoT of today, which is BoP by any other name.

It was what motor racing is meant to be. There was a rulebook - engineers and aerodynamicists read it, and designed and built a car and went racing. Drivers then raced them hard but fair. Oh for such simple days.

There is an argument that what we had wasn't sustainable.

That's an easy statement to make about something that cost a shedload of money and is no longer what it once was. Fashionable even.

But the reasons for the demise of the LMP1 category can't be explained by such simple rhetoric. The sands of the global automotive industry were shifting as the big OEMs turned their attention to electrification at the same time as Formula E started to build momentum. There was also the costly dieselgate scandal that embroiled the Volkswagen Group, of which Porsche and Audi are a part.

They were complicated times. Don't forget that Audi initially announced its factory entry into FE's fourth season in 2017/18 as an adjunct to LMP1, not as a replacement. The world seems to have forgotten that.

Porsche did do a straight swap, though. Toyota was left as the only manufacturer and the category was on its way out because there wasn't anything left underneath.

The real problem for LMP1 in the high-tech era was that the category was all icing and not much cake. It had the manufacturers, but not the privateers. The independents who'd been left for dead by the turbodiesels in the late '00s pretty much faded from the scene once the hybrid era started.

Sportscar racing needs privateers even in its highest echelons, always has and always will. But privateers don't need sportscar racing if they haven't got even the faintest whiff of a chance.

That's not to take anything away from the era that's now passing. The eyes of the world are on the very front of the field, as will be the focus of chroniclers of motorsport in years to come. The dewy-eyed romanticism that comes with time won't start to build for a while yet, but I hope this era gets a proper shout in the history books.

I can't predict whether we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Porsche 919 Hybrid with quite the same vigour as we did the half-century of another technological marvel, the 917. But I certainly hope so.

I wouldn't swap my time reporting on the modern era for a ticket in a time machine to 1970

The 917 has a special place in history for all sorts of reasons: it was a car deemed too dangerous to drive by many in its formative season, it subsequently dominated and was then legislated out of world championship sportscar racing.

It's a great story with a nice second chapter over in Can-Am Challenge in North America. Then, of course, there's the car's starring performance in Steve McQueen's Le Mans movie.

Porsche has done its bit to create some value-added heritage for the 919. The 917 has a beautifully-shot if plot-limited movie; the 919 has a record-smashing lap on the Nurburgring-Nordschleife with the Evo version of the car.

Perhaps the problem will be that the 919 isn't a thing of beauty like its forebear, but I'll be banging the drum for the high-tech LMP1s in 20 or so years' time. I wouldn't swap my time reporting on sportscar racing in the modern era for a one-way ticket in a time machine to 1970.

Sure, I'd love to have witnessed Pedro Rodriguez's comeback drive in the wet at the BOAC 1000 a Brands Hatch in 1970, but I got to follow Le Mans 2008, Le Mans '11, and, and, and. I also had the joy of watching the current breed of LMP1 machine going flat-chat through some of the great corners of the world, multiple times every year.

I'll treasure that forever, which is why I'll be heading out to Becketts some time over this weekend to watch factory hybrid LMP1 cars one last time at one of my favourite vantage points. If you're heading to Silverstone, I'd urge you to do the same.

And bring a hanky, if not for you, then for me.