Remembering Group C

Let's leave F1 alone for a week. I've nothing to add to the vast acres of coverage of the Renault 'race-fixing' scandal. The series of articles on the subject on Joe Saward's blog and last week's MPH column in Autosport together give a pretty good overview of the whole grubby affair. It appears that we have seen the back of Flavio Briatore. For me, he was always the personification of so much that is wrong with modern F1. His lack of any real interest in racing, his love of tawdry glamour, his willingness to do anything for a quick buck. I doubt he'll be missed.

The Renault team, though, has got a stay of execution - at least so long as chairman Carlos Ghosn doesn't decide that enough is enough. So there will still be two full manufacturer teams in the sport next year, assuming Toyota don't make a dash for the exit door, as is currently rumoured.

In the end, I'm still not convinced that Formula 1 really makes that much sense for major car makers. For the man on the street, it has always been first and foremost about the drivers, and not about the cars. Ferrari are a bit of a special case, and dyed-in-the-wool anoraks like me have our favourite teams, but most people are fans of Alonso, or Raikkonen, or Hamilton, not Toyota, BMW or Renault. In any case, the cars these days are so devoid of distinctive character, so visually alike, that it would be hard for most people to tell them apart were they painted uniform white, let alone decide upon a favourite.

The other weekend, I was catching up with my father, and he said that if he was to pick his absolute favourite experience of seeing motorsport trackside - he'd have to go with the opening laps of the 1990 British Empire Trophy, at Silverstone, the third round of that year's Group C Sports Car Championship. For me, it doesn't top the opening lap of the European Grand Prix at Donington - I was a huge Senna fan as a kid - but I was there with him and I can see what he means. The sight of the Sauber Mercedes and TWR Jaguars going doorhandle to doorhandle through Woodcote as if they were in a ten lap sprint rather than a 3 hour endurance race was quite something to behold.

It strikes me that this was the kind of series that made sense for motor manufacturers. For a start, it was all about the cars, rather than the drivers. Nobody really cared whether Mauro Baldi and Jochen Mass beat Alain Ferte and Andy Wallace. It was about Jaguar versus Porsche, versus Mercedes, versus the Japanese arrivistes, Mazda, Nissan and Toyota. And the cars were much more interesting than modern F1 cars. At the risk of oversimplifying massively, it was essentially a fuel-economy formula. Teams could run, within reason, whatever engine configuration they wanted, but simply running the biggest, most powerful block possible would leave the car running dry long before the race's end. As a result, there was huge variety in engines - Jaguar tried both stock-block 7 litre normally aspirated and 3 litre V6 turbo engines, Mercedes ran a 5 litre turbo, Aston Martin a 6 litre Callaway beast, while Toyota experimented with both 4 and 8 cylinder turbos. Mazda ploughed their own furrow with the distinctive, wailing 1.3l rotary engines which can still be found in their road cars.

It must also have counted for something that these cars were works of beauty, something that can be said of no modern F1 car. The Porsche 962 is a design classic, while the late 1980s series of Sauber Mercedes machines are to my mind perhaps the most visually arresting racing cars I've ever set eyes on. Worthy successors to the Silver Arrows of 1930s Grand Prix racing. Nissan and Aston Martin's efforts - the RC90 and the AMR1, also stand out, though somewhat heretically, I never much cared for

Group C racing never received the kind of coverage that F1 did - a short-ish entry in the back pages of the broadsheets, but little in the way of terrestrial TV coverage, save at Le Mans. It did, however, attract vastly greater crowds than sportscar racing manages to these days. People might not have been able to tell you who was at the wheel, but even casual racing fans would have known who won Le Mans - and even those who couldn't care less about motorsport might have recognised a TWR Jaguar XJR9. Not something one could say with confidence of the Aston Martin Lolas, Courage-AERs and ORECA-Aims that were fighting it out for the LMES series at Silverstone the other weekend. The lower profile of the series, in comparison to F1, probably helped play a part in keeping budgets sensible too. The potential rewards were smaller, and, while I have no way of knowing for sure, budgets probably reflected this. Certainly, a private team with the money to buy a Porsche 962 could, for many years, stand a chance of beating the works if they could buy in a couple of talented guys to drive it.

For a few years, Group C provided the purist racing fan with a fascinating, multi-dimensional contest fought out with exotic, mechanically interesting racing machinery. The drivers were very much a secondary consideration, but guys like Martin Brundle, Andy Wallace, Alain Ferte, Mauro Baldi and Bob Wollek certainly weren't slow. Oh, and there was that young German kid with the funny-shaped chin in one of the Sauber Mercedes. He didn't do bad...

It didn't last. The series went from having capacity grids and huge crowds in 1990, to struggling to put together a grid of 10 cars, to play to deserted venues, just two years later. There was no 1993 World Sportscar Championship. The death of Group C could probably be a whole article in itself. Was it simply a victim of the recession of the early 1990s? Of the growing media attention given to touring car racing? Or was it killed quite deliberately by the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone, who weren't keen on anything that looked like it might one day be a threat to F1. Certainly, in retrospect, the switch to F1-spec 3.5l normally aspirated engines was a bad move. But whether it was intended to kill the series, or whether it was simply a miscalculated attempt to provide a market for old F1 engines, is hard to say. Its our loss. Sports car racing has never been the same since. Every now and again, the LMES, or ALMS, looks like it might be on the up-swing, but it never quite works out. Probably now, with so many sports and activities competing for the public's attention, there will only ever be room for one high-profile racing series, and that will be Formula 1. But it's a shame, because in many ways, Group C racing personified so much of what F1 lacks.

Class War

Cricket and sportscar racing are perhaps not two sports most people would immediately associate with each other. At a superficial glance, about the only thing they appear to have in common is a worrying degree of infiltration by organised crime elements. Having watched the coverage of the recent Sebring 12 hour race though, it strikes me that the other thing that they share is that they both work very well on the radio.

In the usual run of things, long distance sportscar races are not close fought affairs, with drivers fighting over tenths of a second. Like test cricket, the races tend to evolve slowly over time rather than being decided by a single bold passing manouevre or a brief flurry of fast laps. And rather than watching the on-screen action, I found myself working on other things and listening to the excellent commentary provided by Chris Parsons and John Hindhaugh. Much like listening to the cricket on Radio 4. As it turned out, the battle in the GT2 class really did end up going down to the wire, and after 12 hours ther was just 0.2s separating the Ferrari of Melo, Salo and Mowlem from the chasing Flying Lizard Porsche of Bergmeister, Lieb and Van Overbeek. In the other classes, though, the result was never in quite so much dispute. There was no doubting that, providing one of them finished, an Audi R10 would win in LMP1, and while the Acura team went into the event as underdogs in LMP2, by the half distance point, it was clear that the Porsche challenge had self-destructed and that the Andretti-Green car merely had to keep going in order to win its class. GT1 was a private battle between the 2 works Corvettes, as the only other car in the field, a private Aston Martin had neither the same level of preparation nor the same strength in depth in its driver line-up.

The main interest in the race, aside from the GT2 battle, lay in whether the Acura tortoise might beat the Audi hare in the battle for overall honours. Going into the final hour and a half, the Andretti-Green machine was still in with a shout of victory because, while it had never been on the pace of the Audi all day, it had run absolutely reliably. The Audi, on the other hand, had been beset by punctures and penalties, as well as simply ending up plain unlucky with the timing of caution periods from time to time. In the end, the battle's climax never quite came, 90 minutes from the end, the Acura developed various electrical maladies, and dropped six laps off the pace of the lead Audi.

What this battle highlighted, however, is the confusion over classes in top level sports car racing right now. In theory, the American ALMS and European LMES series each run with the same four classes, and the FIA GT series runs classes equivalent to their GT1 and GT2 classes. In practice, however, there are peculiar idiosyncracies which are stopping the sport from being as successful as it might be and preventing cars from being effectively developed to race on both sides of the Atlantic. To my mind, the most fundamental of these is that of having LMP1 and LMP2 categories in the first place. In theory, the LMP2 category is aimed at smaller, private teams, while the LMP1 category is for those gunning for outright victories. The problem is that, in practice, two big manufacturers, Porsche and Honda, have built serious LMP2 machines, while in America, only Audi are racing a serious LMP1 contender. As has been pointed out over at Fastest Lap, a situation has been allowed to develop where different motor manufacturers have decided to avoid facing each other directly, and compete to different rules.

However, with only Audi competing in the top category, now that Dyson have traded in their LMP1 Lolas (which started out life as LMP2 MGs) for LMP2 Porsches, the racing is liable to be even more predictable than in the days when Audi used to face off against those weird front engined Panoz prototypes. Perhaps as a direct result, the ALMS organisers have amended the rules to allow the LMP2 cars to run larger air restrictors - enough to bring the LMP2 cars within striking distance of the Audis, at least at circuits like St Petersburg, where the lighter weight of the LMP2 cars helps to offset their power disadvantage.

This has resulted in a distinct break with the LMES and Le Mans, which runs to the ACO's rulebook. With Audi, Peugeot, Pescarolo and Rollcentre all running good serious LMP1 efforts, the organisers have felt no need to tilt the rules in favour of the baby prototype class. The downside of this has been that the Porsche Spyder, surely the most well-made customer prototype since, oh, well, probably the Porsche 962 actually, is not a serious option for European-based sportscar teams.

In Europe, the greater controversy is over the rules setting out the equivalency between diesel and petrol engines. Pescarolo, especially, have been vocal in arguing that the top-line diesel engines aren't available to privateers, and that the equivalency formula does not create true equality between the two fuels at all. In other words, the deck has been deliberately stacked against the privateers, who are already at enough of a disadvantage in terms of budget and resources.

Similar problems pertain in the GT classes, particularly in GT1, as the superiority of the Porsches in GT2, and their ready availability to any private team with the money to buy one has meant there has been less scope for argument. The problem here is not in the restrictions placed on particular classes, or fuel types, or in turbo/normally aspirated engine equivalency rules, but rather in the restrictions placed on particular cars. In the FIA GT series, the Maserati MC12 has been the car to have for the past couple of seasons (despite the best efforts of Pedro Lamy in the Larbre Ferrari 550 back in 2005). At Le Mans, and in ALMS, on the other hand, different wing and restrictor rules have been applied to the Maserati, such that the works have concluded there's nothing to be gained from racing the cars there. Similar arguments have been had in the past about the Saleen S7R, and in the background, the suspicion is that the rules are being subtly tilted in favour of GM's Pratt & Miller Corvettes.

The long and short of it is that the rules in sportscar racing are an overcomplicated mess that are impeding any serious revival of what as recently as 20 years ago was the second most significant racing category in the world, certainly when seen from Europe. None of the major series are in as much of a mess as Champ Car at the moment, but its hard to ignore the fact that the most open sportscar series in the world right now is the one those stubby little Daytona Prototypes compete in. I enjoyed their recent race at Homestead, it was close fought and there were plenty of potential winners, but surely there's more to sportscar racing than thinly disguised spec-car racing round makeshift rovals?