The Average Fan's View
By Brent Jackson
As a member of Grand American's Cognoscenti, I felt justified to give my bit on how sports car racing in North America is doing in 2003.
There is really a vast number of views on this from many different perspectives. There are people that only care about American Le Mans, some who only care about Grand American, and some, like me, who like both. Many members of the Cognoscenti are fans of everything to do with sports car racing. But really the series can't be compared to each other all that well, because in reality they both have very different views on how sports cars should run and how they should exist.
First is Grand-Am. The series began in 2000 as a group of racers who felt the American Le Mans series was getting too expensive for privateers to handle. In many regards, this may be correct. Among the teams were 1999 champions Dyson Racing and other top class ALMS teams. For the first three seasons, both organisations followed mostly the same formula. This changed in 2002, as Grand-Am announced they would kill off the LMPs for 2003 and have the Daytona Prototypes instead. This move caused many of the arguments to sprout, many saying the formula would fail and Grand-Am would die off. Well, its July 2003 and Grand-Am is alive and well. Grand-Am has moved to abandon the somewhat European-based ideas the ALMS follows and create its own special rules specific to North America.
ALMS has followed roughly ACO-similar rules since its inception in 1999. If they had stayed to its 1999 formula, Grand-Am might never had a reason to exist - the 1999 ALMS season was a barn-burner. But Audi appeared in mid-2000 and has absolutely dominated the sport ever since, at one point winning 12 races in a row. Panoz has been the shining star in fighting them, but Panoz' prototype program is coming to an end. GM's Cadillac LMP program died after 2002, GM unwilling to fund it in order to keep up with Audi - something which to this day infuriates me, as Cadillac was getting close to a win. MG's LMP675 program has as well fought hard against Audi, but reliability has been a b---- for them since the beginning. 2003 would be the year IMSA's reputation was tarnished. A boardroom battle kept dominant Audi Team Joest from coming to Le Mans, and the Audis did little but run shotgun to the Bentley effort.
I have watched Le Mans since 1998, and even the pushover 2000 race wasn't as boring. It got more insulting when the drivers who had developed the Bentley EXP program - namely American Butch Leitzinger and Brit Andy Wallace - were fired in favour of former Audi pilot Tom Kristensen and Aussie ex-Panoz driver David Brabham. Kristensen promptly won his fifth Le Mans - joining Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx as the only guys to win five of them - and his fourth in succession. But boardroom battle don't describe Grand-Am - the Daytona Prototypes have fought tooth and nail all season, and fast GTS and GT entries have made things interesting as well. Which is better? I don't know. In terms of sophistication and prestige, ALMS wins hands down. But Brock Yates put it well - "the bulls--- stops when the green flag drops." Grand-Am has been much more exciting, all the more so from David vs. Goliath battles - unsponsored GT team Marcus Motorsports, with a 1995 BMW M3, is leading the GT points battle. The DPs are interesting too - Bell Motorsport's Doran-Chevrolet and the two Brumos Racing Fabcar-Porsches have been brawling all year, and the G&W Motorsports Picchio has shown flashes of definite potential - especially at the Paul Revere 250, where it led 21 of the 70 laps before Geoff Bodine had his accident. Now, with Grand-Am adopting new GT rules and the deadline for the new 2004 ACO prototype rules approaching, the decider of which series will do better is going to be answered in the next 18 months. Come Sebring 2005, it maybe 2004 LMPs running, more of the IMSA vs. Grand-Am battle, or even the DPs running. But until then, fans of both series can argue for their favourite if they like. I take the positive side of both. We may have Grand-Am cough and sputter, or we may have a repeat of 1983, where IMSA upstaged the Europeans and did better as a result.
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