Sammy, if they didn't adjust the rules midseason in ALMS to make it competitive, there wouldn't be anyone left racing...
Yesterday's race at Road America was a typical ALMS race: sparse. The Audi's, Dyson Lola's & another Lola in LMP1, the Spyders & Interscope in LMP2, the Corvettes & Astons in GT1 and a host of RSR's, an M3, a couple of Esperante's and F430's in GT2. That's it, you think IRL and Champ Cars have troubles filling out a field?
You HAVE to have rules (sometimes changed from race to race) to try and make it competitive. Look at the Group C vs GTP scenario: Group C could literally do whatever you want (engine displacement, turbocharging, etc) but you were allocated a certain amount of fuel and that was it. If you could make 1,500 bhp (which some cars could, the 962C was over 1,000 without restrictors and HIGH boost) but only got 1 mpg you were going to be in trouble in a 1,000 km race. My analogy in my previous post was a common occurence. A car would have a huge lead, get less mileage than what they hoped, and literally sat at the finish line waiting for the race to end or ran out of gas. Meanwhile, other cars that had less power and better fuel mileage simply kept chugging along, making up the laps they fell behind and ended up winning the race...no wonder the demise of Group C. I absolutely despised it...
IMSA tried to do it differently. To encourage a variety of manufacturers to participate (and stay), they HAD to have an engine equivalency formula. You had Porsche with a 3.0L/3.2L single turbo (later twin-turbo) flat 6, Nissan with a 3.0L twin-turbo V6, Jaguar with a 7L V12 and later 3.0L twin-turbo V6, Chevy with a twin-turbo V6 & Chevy/Pontiac/Ford with big-block V8's, Toyota with a 2.1L turbo 4-cyl, Mazda with a 3-rotor, I'm missing others but these were the major players. How do you make it work?
Turbo restrictors and car weight's were the major ways they made it fairly equivalent. If you give everyone a clean sheet to work from and no rules, you only have one or two manufacturers who have the resources, technology or desire to even participate, what fun is it to see only a handful of cars on the track (and have to shell out big bucks to see)?
The German DTM series was another example: Audi, BMW, Ford, Mercedes, Opel were spending HUGE amounts of money, in the heyday they had more spectators at their events other than F1 events and some manufacturers/teams spent almost as much money as F1 teams. It was great racing, think NASCAR except on road courses driving saloon (sedans). You won on Sunday, you were penalized on Monday with a weight increase and kept putting the pounds on until someone else won and everything was balanced out.
If you have one manufacturer run away with the series due to superior technology and/or a huge financial budget, pretty soon you no longer will have a series...
ALMS is set-up to be a Manufacturers series, but Audi, Porsche, Corvette & Panoz (all different classes) are the only ones playing (Acura in 2007). If it weren't for the privateers & a few "unofficial" factory entries, the series would already have the life support plug pulled.
Audi vs. Dyson in LMP1 & Porsche vs. Interscope in LMP2. Yeah, a real competitive balance...
Ralph