The rules crisis facing the World Endurance Championship

If you're not particularly enthused by the prospect of a pair of Toyotas - and realistically two Toyotas only - slugging it out at the Le Mans 24 Hours unchallenged next month, then you've probably got an eye on 2021 and a new era for the World Endurance Championship. I only wish I could tell you the shape and the form of the cars that will be vying for outright victory in the world's greatest race two years hence.

I can't tell you now, and I probably won't be able to tell you tomorrow after what what could turn out to be one of those seminal days in the sometimes tortured history of sportscar racing. Probably not next week, either. That's how uncertain these times are.

Le Mans 24 Hours organiser and WEC promoter the Automobile Club de l'Ouest, together with the FIA, will ask for commitments to its hypercar concept rules package at a technical working group in Paris on Thursday. That's firm pledges from manufacturers to be on the grid in 2020/21 when the regulations are due to come into force.

There appears to be a growing exasperation among the rulemakers and the WEC organisation after a group of manufacturers came knocking on their door earlier this year. As a result, they changed course back in March to allow production-based hypercars to compete in a class conceived for purpose-built prototype lookalikes, yet no one has as yet committed to coming with a car based on a road-going machine.

The problem right now is that there aren't any rules for the replacement for LMP1. Certainly not for road-based machinery, nor really for the hypercar prototypes any more.

Rules for those, if you remember, were published back in December, but the change in March to accommodate real hypercars will inevitably lead to a raft of changes that haven't been finalised. That has destabilised the plans of those - Toyota included - who are or were working on prototypes.

Aston Martin, one of the manufacturers that pushed for the inclusion of real hypercars, privately points out that you can't commit to a category if you don't have a set of rules. That's a fair point.

My question is how did we get to this invidious situation? The rulemakers and the manufacturers spent the early months of last year at so-called roundtable meetings working out a plan of attack. And then after the ACO and the FIA announced the hypercar concept in broad brush-stroke terms during Le Mans week last year, they spent another five months in technical working group meetings - around tables of undisclosed shape - thrashing out the detail.

And here we are in May 2019 - just under 16 months before the new category is due to begin at Silverstone in September 2020 - without a clear set of rules. Or even a clear direction of where we are heading.

Rulebooks, however clever, are nothing more than door stops if they don't attract cars and, in this case, manufacturers

Why did a group of manufacturers - Aston together with Red Bull, its partner in the Valkyrie project, Ferrari and McLaren - go back to the rulemakers in February suggesting that the costs of the new category were too high and certainly much higher than the projected €25million a season? Were the original discussions quite as inclusive as they were intended to be and certainly should have been? That they weren't is one suggestion.

Another is that Toyota, as an incumbent WEC participant, wielded too much power in the working group. It's probably still too early to say which, if either, is true.

Le Mans and the WEC needs manufacturers at the front of the grid, which is why it yielded to the request of one or more of those marques. That, though, is the reason we find ourselves in this mess.

The WEC in particular had bold aspirations for the new category. It was hoping for, even expecting, multiple manufacturers to arrive on the grid sometime during the 2020/21 season.

The reality was that by February it had Toyota making all the right noises and admitting that it was working on a car, while holding back from making a firm commitment. Niche manufacturer Glickenhaus and WEC stalwart ByKolles said they were in, and there was one other project out there from a group whose identity isn't clear but is said to have a bit of Le Mans form.

Rulebooks, however clever, are nothing more than door stops if they don't attract cars and, in this case, manufacturers. The failure to snare a second big car maker explains why the ACO and the FIA rolled over when Aston and whoever else came knocking.

What we don't know is whether the ACO and the FIA will revert to plan A and the original rulebook should no one sign up to race a real hypercar this week. If they didn't regard one big manufacturer and one small, plus a couple of privateers, as an acceptable starting point for the new class two and a bit months ago, why should they now?

We also don't know who can actually be on the grid in September 2020 with a new-rules prototype given the hiatus of two and a half months that the recent machinations have undoubtedly created.

There could be a new course; there might have to be. WEC boss Gerard Neveu has talked about a plan B - but he really means plan C or possibly even plan D or E - without giving any hint of what it might be.

The WEC and the ACO maintained a wall of silence on the rules discussions over the Spa 6 Hours event earlier this month. They offered nothing more than the promise of more news during Le Mans week, probably because they had nothing to say. Things were, are and will probably still be after tomorrow's meeting, far from clear.

There has been a concept discussed that has been dubbed GTE+. It more or less involves what it says on the tin: increasing the power of the current breed of WEC GT racer, reducing the weight, adding a bit of aero and perhaps doing some tyre development.

The idea appears to have been barely talked about in the technical working group, if at all. But there are manufacturers pushing for it behind the scenes, in what might be described as fringe meetings.

DPi might fill a hole at Le Mans, because there would be a value in the existing competitors extending their programmes across the Pond to include the big race in France. But a full WEC programme? Probably not

Who is in favour of this isn't entirely clear, but it appears that Aston Martin, or rather the Prodrive-run Aston Martin Racing organisation that masterminds the British marque's GTE programme, is among them. Ferrari looks like another supporter, and some suggest that Porsche, only an observer in the original rule-writing process, likes the idea too. Ford, meanwhile, had already raised the prospect of turning its current GT, the most extreme of the current crop of GTE cars, into some kind of hypercar.

The target lap time for the hypercars around the eight and a half miles of the Circuit de la Sarthe is 3m30s - down from the original 3m25s for the prototypes - and engineers I have talked to suggest that would be possible for a souped up GTE contender with all the upgrades listed above.

But creating one class out of another category could be problematical. Where would it leave GTE as it is, particularly the GTE Am division? Two categories made up of machinery with the same starting point might be confusing. And how much would the LMP2 cars have to be slowed to maintain a distinct gap between the classes? Plus GTE, as GT Le Mans, is an important constituent part of IMSA SportsCar Championship, not to mention a component of the European Le Mans Series.

Then there's safety. The original hypercar concept rules involved a significant upgrade in this respect: larger cockpit volumes and more stringent crash tests were mandated.

But now we're talking about road-based machinery doing near-LMP1 lap times. Don't forget that of the current crop of GTE racers, only the Ford GT is built around a carbon-monocoque.

If that's plan C, then plan D involves looking across the Atlantic. IMSA's Daytona Prototype international category is out there in North America and ostensibly healthy with three manufacturers in Cadillac, Acura and Mazda, and an arm's length involvement from Nissan.

The basis of the class is the LMP2 rulebook, which the ACO has been keen to point out in recent weeks. Because a manufacturer can take an off-the-shelf P2 car, put in its own engine and bolt on a few of its own panels to give the cars its own look, it's cheap. The idea thrown out there by IMSA's top brass that no one involved is spending more than $20million may or may not be true, but it hints at how cost-effective the formula is.

But it would also be wrong to say that adopting DPi for the WEC in 2020/21 would result in the manufacturers currently involved in the category signing up for the world championship. Don't forget that Cadillac and Acura aren't global brands, though their parent companies, General Motors and Honda, are.

DPi might fill a hole at Le Mans, because there would be a value in the existing competitors extending their programmes across the Pond to include the big race in France. But a full WEC programme? Probably not.

The key to DPi being adopted by the WEC might involve those manufacturers sniffing around the category right now. They include Ford and BMW, who of course are racing right now in GTE Pro in the WEC. Both have publicly stated that the top class in the WEC and IMSA should be one and the same. But where would the adoption of DPi leave the remaining manufacturer competing in LMP1 in the WEC right now?

Toyota's programme is essentially one founded on research and development and its ability to push forward its hybrid technologies in a racing environment. DPi doesn't incorporate energy-retrieval systems at the moment, though it almost certainly will when the next rules cycle begins in 2022.

But what is being proposed by IMSA probably wouldn't appeal to Toyota. It appears to be heading down the route of bolt-on mild hybrid, a spec unit working only on the rear axle. That's not what Toyota needs from the WEC.

The timescales for the introduction of what is being called DPi 2.0 and the new top class of the WEC don't quite coincide. That could be a problem, but perhaps not an insurmountable one.

The lack of time ahead of the start of the 2020/21 season is more problematical. Which raises the prospect of a delay to the start of the new era for the WEC.

Extending what is already a transitional period for the WEC could be potentially disastrous. Toyota has said that it has little interest in returning for yet another season with its TS050 HYBRIDs in 2020/21. And it's not as if the series is awash with privateers in LMP1.

Where does this leave the WEC right now? In a sorry mess, I would say, a malaise that threatens the very existence of the championship.

The problem is that the WEC doesn't stack up without a healthy top class with significant manufacturer involvement. Le Mans and the WEC need car makers for the cachet they bring and the marketing money they spend.

I'm not sure that I share the view that the manufacturers are entirely responsible for cocking this whole thing up, but it's time for them to nail their colours to the mast. The future of the highest level of sportscar racing being decided on a show of hands at a one-off meeting in Paris would make a mockery of the drawn out rule-making process stretching back well over a year. But it might be the only way forward. Desperate times call for desperate measures.