The lessons World Touring Cars must heed from history

When drivers, teams, carmakers, a series promoter and its governing body are all voicing similar degrees of concern on the same topic, you know there's a fairly significant issue at hand.

World Touring Cars is only entering its second - and, at present, final agreed - season run to TCR's customer-friendly regulations, but already the difference in standard between this year and last is marked.

That's perhaps a legacy of the hurried efforts to get the series off the ground before the start of 2018, but what was already a professional-looking championship last year has, for lack of a better cliche, stepped up a level for '19.

Three of the smallest teams have immediately fallen off the grid. Boutsen Ginion and Zoltan Zengo's plucky Zengo Motorsport squad were the truest of privateers and, while Peugeot placed driver Aurelien Comte at the DG Sport Competition outfit in 2018, the brand wasn't prepared to put the budget in to match some of this year's big hitters in a series in which petrol engines are still being used - a verdict Eurosport Events head Francois Ribeiro called "brutal" but accepted was not "arguable".

Campos Racing, which had the backing of WTCR's presenting partner Oscaro plus then Cupra driver Pepe Oriola among its ranks, is also gone.

In place come notable entries, such as a four-car effort from Cyan Racing, which will run all-new Lynk & Co 03 cars developed by its partner Geely Group Motorsport, while expanded support from the likes of Volkswagen - now without a World Rallycross programme to juggle - for Sebastien Loeb Racing, plus a host of more works driver deals, are among significant changes.

That's great news on the face of it. It's inarguable that a field that contains six FIA world champions, featuring the biggest names from the past two decades of tin-top racing, is world-class - some might say it's one deserving of world championship status - while the arrival of Geely brand Lynk & Co proves that the series is able to attract new brands, even if manufacturers are outlawed.

The problem is through various means costs are creeping up, and before you know it the series will be hurtling towards a Super Touring-esque peak in record time - which only means the trough will be reached faster too.

"We are still in some sort of honeymoon where you get the best of everything. Of course, there is a risk that manufacturers get involved and destroy the championship" Christian Dahl

Few will deny anything has changed - Ribeiro says the competition is at the "next step" compared to 2018, while long-standing Honda driver Tiago Monteiro admits the trend of "hidden" works teams is a growing one. But even if the contemporary incarnation of World Touring Cars hasn't been rife with boom and bust cycles, enough in the ranks have been around long enough to know exactly where things are headed.

It's easy to be blinkered, to see the drivers and variety of brands on the grid and marvel. But all the while you gaze longingly at the quality on show, the chances are increasing of spending escalating to a point where, as Ribeiro says, "we would kill the championship, simply".

The reason this spending is so pertinent is largely due to the technical formula now in place. Spending growths wouldn't have been such a problem in the World Touring Car Championship's higher-tech, manufacturer-aimed TC1 era (pictured above), but TCR - the brainchild of Marcello Lotti and his WSC Group - was billed as a low-cost, customer-friendly product. Cost caps on the purchasing price of cars, plus a strict ban on manufacturer presence, are big contributors to the concept's rapid growth.

The absorption of TCR's original flagship series, TCR International, by the WTCC was inevitably going to result in a rise in costs - not least because higher-profile teams would become involved, and staff from defunct WTCC operations would need new homes - but the speed with which cost-control talks have become important and the urgency with which stakeholders are having to act is something of a surprise.

"They took the regulation Marcello Lotti built very, very successfully completely without manufacturers and then they took the history of World Touring Car Racing from Eurosport and FIA and merged that for 2018 and the same for '19," says Cyan CEO Christian Dahl.

"But I think we are still in some sort of honeymoon where you get the best of everything - of course, when the commercial value increases, a lot more established drivers with branding themselves come, [and] there is a risk that manufacturers get involved and destroy the championship.

"If you look at what Hyundai did in 2018, it was a big step compared to how TCR International was before, and of course what Geely Group Motorsport has done is similar to Hyundai because you can't enter a new championship and not pay what the best manufacturers are doing."

Hyundai Motorsport customer racing head Andrea Adamo, whose wealth of tin-top experience includes work on Alfa Romeo's and Honda's touring car projects, adds: "If people want to go on and pretend, let people believe that everyone is a virgin in the paddock, OK. I will be the first one saying I'm a virgin. We cannot forget that this is WTCR.

"I can believe whatever you want. But if we agree that we call things with their names, and we agree that we have to manage things - to a certain level or reasonable level - having still some [non-works] teams running around, we will get a great championship.

"But we need to work in a very close stable, and let no one slip through the door. Because it's happened many times in the past. I want to believe it will not happen if we are close like this, but going back we had Group A things, then we went to two-litre in the BTCC contract and we said to each other 'the rules were good because there was reasonable spending'. Then we went up, up, up. We arrived in 1999 when the money was too much."

"All the teams told me, 'No, no, Francois, don't worry, we want to keep the testing restrictions as they are, we're not going to test too much'. I know they have been lying to me" Francois Ribeiro

Dahl's acknowledgement that Geely has invested significantly in the project displays an openness seen less frequently in other quarters, but he still believes teams are able to keep a lid on costs.

But while a number of outfits have expressed similar views, the FIA isn't so sure that will happen.

"The risk with this type of success is that we could suffer," says FIA circuit championships director Frederic Bertrand. "Because the level of interest is growing, the level of awareness is growing, and winning becomes more important. We have different brands there - even if they are not directly involved they are always behind [programmes]. They have some challenges and some targets, so they will all push a little bit.

"The difficulty in controlling cost, or the aim we have behind that, is more to prevent the teams - which are looking on a short-term basis - to endanger the championship on a longer-term basis."

FIA touring car commission president Alan Gow adds: "It underpins everything we do in the commission, when we make regulation changes and everything else, [the focus] is what impact it will have on the cost controls. And Fred is right, there are two different philosophies; of course, a team will spend whatever they can, whatever they've got available to them, to win this weekend or this year.

"They're not necessarily thinking like we do of five or 10 years down the track. So we've all got the same objective to produce good, exciting racing, [but] they don't look at it long-term, race teams look at the next race meeting. And this championship, this year, they don't look at where it's going in five years. They may say they do, but the reality is they don't."

While Gow says no warning signs, per se, emerged over the winter, Ribeiro, too, is wary of taking self-restraint claims at face value. That's even with restrictions in place on testing - with a ban on running at WTCR circuits in-season - and staffing levels, which mean only 10 operational personnel with armbands may work on a car during a race weekend.

"All the teams told me, 'No, no, Francois, don't worry, we want to keep the testing restrictions as they are, we're not going to test too much and so on," says Ribeiro. "But I have received every week tyre consumption from Yokohama. That's the best possible indicator. And I know they [the teams] have been lying to me.

"The danger is the amount of testing, the amount of staff. The teams, they told me, 'Ah, can we reduce one set of tyres per weekend'. I said, 'OK, how much will you save?' Great, you are going to save €6000 across the season. Meanwhile, if you bring one extra engineer for the data, for instance, one guy plus his travel cost is minimum €100,000 for the season. One guy. Five days of testing, bang, €200,000. So we need to attack cost control where it really matters."

Ribeiro is a proud man, and a fierce defender of the projects he works on. While that meant TC1 became something of a millstone around his neck towards the end, one of his biggest strengths is an openness to new ideas and putting his weight behind them.

It's ultimately still too early to say what lengths Eurosport and the FIA will go to in order to "protect the championship from itself" and preserve TCR's "common interest", so for now we can only judge Ribeiro on initial measures introduced and the concerns he recognises. So far he's talking the right talk.

There's one mechanism that may help make this a success, and that's Balance of Performance. WTCR's position at the top of the TCR pyramid meant it was the main point of reference for BoP (which is applied to all TCR-certified series) and, although there were occasional flash points, complaints gradually died down over the course of the first season.

The issuing of the initial BoP for 2019 last week prompted the BRC Racing team representing Hyundai in WTCR to issue a statement slamming the calculations, but if TCR gets this right over the course of the year it neuters the incentive for manufacturers to spend big - on development, at least - in pursuit of victory.

"I think the key to success is to have manufacturers trusting the Balance of Performance, because if the manufacturers developing the car don't trust the BoP, of course you have to build the rocketship and see where you end up," says Dahl.

"But if you trust it you should basically be able to look at the Lynk & Co or the Hyundai or the Honda and see 'OK, this is the level we need'.

"If that goes away, or as it has been on occasions with Balance of Performance championships that they basically balance results instead of performance of the car, then it will be difficult because... in my world, the racing team going to the racetrack and the race drivers are going to the track to compete, they shouldn't be balanced."

Maybe it's inevitable that teams will eventually outgrow the controls of the framework, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be an attempt to stymie spending increases.

"OK, someone can say that world history is a turning wheel, but if we can relent a bit the wheel turning, it will prolong it," says Adamo. "That's my point of view, without pretending to be the virgin."

Getting this deal together in the first place wasn't the work of a moment, and married three parties - two of which have famously been at odds in the past.

If for nothing else but the sake of the effort that went into organising that in the first place, stakeholders have to act in the common interest of the series, as Ribeiro puts it, to ensure there is a viable future that doesn't destroy the philosophy of the rules at the series' core.