Among the changes the ACO has announced for the FIA World Endurance Championship was a return to Sebring, Florida for a 12-hour race for the first time since the series' inaugural season in 2012. However, unlike in 2012 when it was a combined race with the American Le Mans Series, the 2019 race will be run separately from 12-hour race of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship in the same weekend.
The American Le Mans Series featured LMP1, LMP2, and GTE from ACO's classes with the addition of the PC and GTC classes. That made it easy to include Sebring in the 2011 Intercontinental Le Mans Cup schedule, the predecessor for the FIA WEC. All ILMC classes apart from GTE-Am had their counterparts in the ALMS class structure.
The classes remained the same from the ILMC to the FIA WEC for 2012, yet the class structure for Sebring was more complicated. LMP1, LMP2, and GTE-Pro were split to separate classes for the WEC and the ALMS teams, despite sharing common regulations.
2012 was the last race for the WEC at Sebring, though LMP1 machines returned for one more time in the 2013 ALMS race. In 2014 the ALMS merged with the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series and LMP1 was dropped from the united series' class structure. WEC teams have still returned to Sebring from the LMP2 and GTE classes that remain in the IMSA WeatherTech Championship.
2019 will see the WEC and the LMP1 machines returning to Sebring. But the WEC and the IMSA series have grown too much apart to run alongside each other. WEC's LMP2 would fall into IMSA's P class and WEC's GTE-Pro would fall into IMSA's GTLM class, though there are some significant differences in the race procedures, like pit stops and caution periods, in the two organizations' rule books. And most importantly, IMSA's prototype teams could hardly race for the overall victories against WEC's LMP1 teams, so the two series will race separately.
I have mixed feelings about the WEC's return to Sebring. Back in the ALMS days when the Rolex 24 was for Daytona Prototypes in the Grand-Am series, Sebring was the second-most important race for Le Mans Prototypes, only behind Le Mans itself. As great as the re-unification was for American sportscar racing, Sebring lost the global top class prototypes. Sebring will get them back in 2019, though the separate races are only a poor compromise. When there are two races, which one will crown the overall winner?
The need for separate IMSA and WEC races showcases what I think is a big problem in sportscar racing, the conflicting regulations in different organizations. The competition between different organizations' series is already a bit destructive for the sportscar racing overall. Sebring and Daytona will probably never be as big as Le Mans is but a top class with limited international relevancy doesn't help either. Yet those two are bigger races than any WEC race outside Le Mans but the WEC's top class wouldn't be sustainable in IMSA competition.
The WEC needs all the classics of prototype racing. It needs Sebring and it would also need Daytona. And not as separate races for the WEC and IMSA but as combined races. The ACO needs to acknowledge IMSA controls the two biggest races after Le Mans, and the two organizations need to create a compatible class structure. Something that is affordable for privateers, what ACO is trying to achieve for LMP1, but not controlled by the balance of performance like DPi is. I wrote earlier about what I think the LMP1 class should be like.
I even go as far as suggesting the ACO and the SRO should align the GT regulations. While both GTE and GT3 are looking healthy at the moment, nobody benefits from the separation of such similar classes. GTE was initially the class for factory teams and GT3 for the privateers, yet there are factory teams in GT3 racing and privateer teams in GTE-Am. Who wouldn't like to see a Ford GT or a Corvette racing for the Spa 24 Hours overall victory, or a Mercedes-AMG GT3 or a McLaren for the Le Mans GTE-Pro victory? At the same time, the class must remain affordable for privateer teams.
Of course, aligning the classes isn't so easy because of all the ongoing projects. Privateers enter LMP1 assuming manufacturers can't enter the class with non-hybrid machines like DPis. Manufacturers have built their DPis for a BoP class so running them unrestricted wouldn't be fair. And a GT convergence wouldn't be fair for those manufacturers that have just launched a new car in either of the current classes.
I have some hope the WEC's return to one of IMSA's major events signifies the start of aligning the regulations of the two organizations. Yet March 2019 may come too soon to abandon the idea of the dual race in favor of a combined race at Sebring.
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