Endurance racing is already a unique challenge, but our writer Luca believes there should be a sim racing championship that requires teams to race in three classes at the same time.
LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE:
Just over a month ago, Ferrari were the overall winners of the 24 hours of Le Mans. It was their first victory overall since 1965, and in their first time back in the top category in half a decade.
But Ferrari never disappeared from Le Mans in those 50 years, they just decided to run in a lower category. In fact just two years prior, two of the drivers who were part of the 2023 overall winning entry Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado took GTE Pro honours.
These high level multi class endurance events have always built themselves on essentially being multiple races in one. But, teams are not required to field an entry in every class. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if they were?
Inspiration from GTA
Anyone who knows me will be aware of the fact that I play a lot of GTA Online. There’s one person who any GTA player that enjoys racing would go to for guidance. Adam ‘Broughy1322’ Brough was our November 2021 Hero of the Month, earning it for his tireless dedication to test every single vehicle in the game to help viewers decide if the performance was worth the cost.
Another thing Broughy has done on GTA was host a racing series. The Multi-Class Endurance Championship ran for five seasons, the first of which saw teams of two race across two classes before expanding to teams of three and three classes for the second season.
Drivers competed for individual glory in their classes, but their combined points total counted towards the team’s championship. Having three types of cars all of varying speeds would certainly prove challenging for all drivers involved.
There has never been an endurance racing championship with a structure quite like this. When you factor in the costs, it’s probably for good reason in the real world. But maybe it could and should happen within sim racing.
iRacing Endurance Revival
Between 2016 and 2020, there was a top level enduro championship on iRacing, the GT iRacing World Championship and then later renamed the iRacing Endurance Series. Some prominent drivers who were champions of the series include Isaac Price, Frederik Rasmussen, Max Benecke and Josh Rogers.
The series unfortunately didn’t continue, which is a shame. With all the premier esports championships held through iRacing like the Porsche TAG Heuer Esports Supercup, eNASCAR, World of Outlaws, Rallycross and the returning Grand Prix series, there’s a big endurance racing-shaped void.
So perhaps it’s the ideal place to apply the format from Broughy’s Multi-Class Endurance Championship.
Imagine this: 16 teams fielding a single entry in three classes, those being LMP3, GT3 and Touring Car. Of course, the only LMP3 car in iRacing is the brand new Ligier so all teams pick that car. The Touring Car category is a bit more varied, with the Honda, Hyundai Elantra and Audi all up for grabs. Then, for the GT3 class, teams can select from the Porsche, Ferrari, Mercedes, BMW and Lamborghini.
Three hour races, we’ll go for four in a season, one per month between November and February. A maximum of two drivers per car in each event (they don’t all have to be the same drivers across the season). The prize money would be in the team’s championship, so it would incentivise teams to field competitive entries across all classes so to not miss out on points.
But there will be an incentive in the individual classes as well. In the GT iRacing World Championship, an additional $500 was given to the highest finishing entry of the car brands they raced. The best Porsche, best Ferrari, best Ford and best BMW pocketed some extra cash, so why not do it for best LMP3, best GT3 and best Touring Car?
With all that being said, now let’s address the downsides of this exact format.
Too Much for Too Little
As keen as I am to see this become a reality, I know the atmosphere around elite sim racing is changing dramatically. ESL R1 just began this year and it offers a year round prize pool of €500,000. It’s probably safe to say that this concept couldn’t attract a sponsor who would give that level of prize money, but could it still be a significant amount?
With each team effectively being mandated to run three races in one, the prize pool would need to be pretty big to be worth many teams’ resources and time. But it’s difficult to believe that any sponsor out there in sim racing would put the money forward for teams to consider it being worth pursuing.
For those of you unaware, I was involved in the conceptulisation of what would become the Esports Racing League/World Cup. This was a set of events hosted by VCO where teams compete across three sim racing platforms, to find the teams with the most versatile set of drivers. There was a $100,000 year round prize pool, half of which was paid out for the World Cup and the other half across multiple seasonal leagues.
Unfortunately, ERL won’t happen this year for a number of reasons. But even if it did, many teams would certainly have their A-drivers on other programs where they could potentially earn more money. “Cool ideas” don’t pay the bills unfortunately, and ERL was funded entirely out of VCO’s own pocket, and they only have so much.
So back to this iRacing Multi-Class Endurance Championship concept. If the potential return on investment isn’t enough to offset the expense of getting all the people needed to run all three entries, then a team wouldn’t commit to it.
Help From an Expert
We reached out to an iRacing team director, Altus Esports’ Simon Feigl who raced in the GT iRacing World Championship. His perspective as the manager of an iRacing team was invaluable.
Feigl theorised that for a series like this, it would require teams to have nine members having to commit. Two drivers and an engineer for each entry. In the GT iRacing World Championship, the prize pool was $25,000 but since teams only needed the one entry, the operating costs were low.
For a series like this to exist, it would need a bigger prize pool than that. But even then, Feigl believes there’s a huge desire for a high level endurance series on iRacing.
I think there is value in it for drivers/teams to be involved even if the prize pool is a bit low. I say that because even in iRacing Special Events, there is no prize pool from the organisers, and it is a pure prestige thing where drivers may be incentivised by their team to compete in it, or it be as part of their annual salary.
When VRS GT Worlds was abandoned, it left just under 200 drivers who were racing at world championship level with nothing, unless they converted to racing the Porsche Cup car in sprint format, which for the vast majority was not an interesting proposition.
Simon Feigl, Altus Esports founder and director, former GT iRacing World Championship competitor
Clearly, there’s still a huge desire to see an endurance world championship on iRacing. Whether it’s made simpler like maybe a single class, or with more than one but no mandatory entries in every class. In any case, I still firmly believe in the genius of Broughy’s MCEC structure from GTA and that an endurance sim racing series like that should exist.
Big thank you to Simon Feigl for the input, and also to GermanSimRacing for providing the imagery of the cars!
What do you think of an iRacing Multi-Class Endurance Championship? Tell us on Twitter at @OverTake_gg or in the comments down below!
