The good and bad of the WEC's 2016 calendar

At last! A calendar that doesn't leave me shrugging my shoulders when friends down the pub on a summer evening ask what's happening in the World Endurance Championship. They couldn't comprehend why there was such a long break after the Le Mans 24 Hours.

And, quite frankly, neither could I.

That's not going to be a problem next year, because the Nurburgring round has been brought forward from the end of August to late July. The reduction of the ridiculous 11-week gap - down from a monstrous 13 weeks in 2014 - between Le Mans in June and the start of the second leg of the series is a positive move. And one that I have long championed.

Any championship needs to build on the momentum of its marquee event. Our American cousins have got it right: there has more often than not been a race straight after the Indy 500 through the history of USAC, CART and IndyCar. Often the very next weekend. Letting the momentum that builds to a crescendo with Le Mans ebb away over the summer months didn't make sense.

A five-week gap, I reckon, is fair enough. Man needs to recover and machine requires a rebuild after a 24-hour race. It will keep the interest in the WEC at the level it deserves, and hopefully lend new kudos to the silverware that can be won at the end of the season.

For the moment, those trophies remain the poor relation to the pots on offer on the middle weekend of June. The new calendar should make the championship less of an afterthought, at least in the minds of the public at large.

This all-important reduction of the summer break has come at a cost, however. A cost to the teams competing in the championship.

Eliminating long breaks after the euphoria of Le Mans is a no-brainer © LAT

The 'Ring has been brought forward, at least in part, to accommodate an additional race on the WEC calendar in Mexico City. Anyone with even limited knowledge of motorsport history should be excited about going to the majestic Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, even if its most famous corner, the Peraltada, has been lost to a twisty jink through a baseball stadium.

WEC boss Gerard Neveu and the Automobile Club de l'Ouest, the promoter of the series, talk about the importance of racing in Latin America and therefore the need to replace the lost Interlagos fixture in Brazil. They also say growth in the calendar sends out the right message from a series that's on the up.

It is difficult to fault their logic, but I'm wondering if it is in the best interests of the series.

Nine races rather than eight will inevitably lead to budget increases. That will be most keenly felt down the grid among the ranks of the privateers competing in LMP2 and GTE Am.

Ask the privateers about the extra race and what it means, and they'll shrug and grimace - and then suggest that they have to fall in line with what the manufacturers want. Yet the truth is even the big guns competing in LMP1 rejected the idea of a ninth race when consulted by Neveu and the ACO.

One might think a major car maker with an eight or nine-figure budget could just shake out its turn-ups to fund an extra race. But it's not quite a simple as that. Pascal Vasselon, who runs the show at Toyota Motorsport GmbH, points out the Japanese marque's budget is already set for next year. I suspect the situation is not too dissimilar at Porsche and Audi.

A ninth race is set to stretch already-tight LMP2 budgets © LAT

The P1 manufacturers were against expansion unless the additional race was, as one senior figure at Audi put it, "cost neutral". The WEC and the ACO will be paying to freight the grid to Mexico, but travel is just one element of a racing budget.

Fuel and tyres aren't free, just as every mile on track comes at a cost. Then you've got to get your team to Mexico City, put them up and pay for the tacos.

Can the teams competing in the WEC sustain an extra race? I'd probably argue that they can't. LMP2 budgets, for example, are on a knife-edge right now.

And, remember, the news of one more race has come at a time when there is a drive towards cost reduction and working groups established to thrash out how to achieve that. It's no good extending engine life, reducing tyre bills and putting restrictions on testing if the money saved has to be spent taking part in another race.

The big question is whether the WEC needs more than eight events, or to put it another way, in excess of 66 hours of racing? What we generically call the world sportscar championship was quite often made up of fewer than eight races and only one one occasion more than 11, yet rarely were more than two or three of those outside Europe. Next year we will have five flyaways.

Back in the 1980s, teams were not obliged to contest all the races as they are today under the terms of their commercial agreement with the WEC. That led to some pretty poorly-supported events. Why? Because teams couldn't afford to go.

Who remembers the Mosport and Kyalami WEC rounds in 1984, a year of four flyaways? A locally-entered Nissan Skyline, taking part to boost the grid, finished third in South Africa behind the pair of Lancia LC2 Group C cars, and by a whopping 40 laps.

The unordered world of sportscar racing in those days has changed, and thankfully so. But the need to prevent costs spiralling out of control hasn't.