Here are some odds and ends looking forward toward 2013.
All three ACO-rules series have released their provisional calendars for the 2013 season. I have combined them and listed them in chronological order:
I have created a public Google Calendar for the ALMS, ELMS, and WEC combined and named it "ACO Racing 2013". I will be updating it and adding information as the year progresses. There are three links to this calendar: HTML, XML, and iCal. All times will be for the U.S. East Coast time zone (EST/EDT, GMT-5/GMT-4) and I'll include maps, race local times, and event schedules as they become available. The first date on the calendar is March 16th 2013.
UPDATE: I have added the dates and locations of the Asian Le Mans Series to the "ACO Racing 2013" calendar.
Further UPDATE: There is a newer post about the 2014 calendars here
There is good reason to hope that the Sebring ALMS round might attract WEC and ELMS entrants, as well as the full-season ALMS competitors, as a tune-up for Le Mans even though it is no longer part of the WEC. Historically Sebring has been utilized in this way, and it is good to see that there are no time conflicts so that it can continue this role.
There remain several dates that conflict with one another, the most troubling is the Fuji WEC round conflicting with the ALMS Petit Le Mans. This year's Petit Le Mans was won overall by team Rebellion's LMP1 Lola/Toyota; they are privateer champions in the WEC. The race was much enriched by Rebellion's presence, especially during the early laps before Muscle Milk's LMP1 HPD/Honda had a major shunt while leading that took them out of contention for the race win. Next year the calendar will likely prevent any guest entrants from the WEC.
I would love to be at the Circuit of the Americas next September for the ALMS/WEC "Super Endurance Weekend". It is going to be the place to be if you want to see the greatest diversity of exotic race cars and their teams in the world. Unfortunately that is the height of hurricane season on St. Thomas and I can't leave my University professor wife on her own at that time of year as she is stuck here teaching.
The ACO have done some smart things to bolster the re-launched ELMS. Changing the format to 3-hour races, sharing the Silverstone weekend with the WEC, and adding additional support races. I just hope these changes are enough to keep the ELMS going. Not all teams can afford to compete in the WEC.
During the Petit Le Mans coverage (around lap 265) Scott Atherton, ALMS CEO, made his way into the announcer's booth and conveyed some information from his "State of the Series" presentation made earlier in the day. Among the most important things he conveyed was further information on the 2013 TV coverage which was accompanied by this graphic:
What is shown here as "Fox Media" is what used to be known as "Speed TV". The length of the Sebring and Petit Le Mans events were not suited to the 2-hour highlight broadcasts that were the only televised formats for them this year with ESPN/ABC; so, wisely they will be covered by Speed/Fox. That is good news for most fans, but unless things change, I am unable to get SpeedTV here in America's paradise and I'm geo-blocked from speedtv.com's videos. Atherton assured the audience that live Internet streaming of entire races and qualifying would continue, but could not say by which "portals" yet. As long as St. Thomas is still considered "International", I should be able to get video from the ALMS web site.
Right here I want to congratulate the ALMS for fixing their early-season technical problems with streaming. For the Baltimore, VIR, and Petit Le Mans rounds, streaming coverage was rock-solid and high quality, even better than the ESPNPlayer streams (higher sustained bit-rate, and no buffering). Atherton acknowledged the problem in his "State of the Series" presentation, and attributed the fix to changing "vendors". Let's hope that the "portals" chosen for next year are at least as good as the ones used for those final 3 rounds.
By the way, you can get a transcript of Atherton's "State of the Series" presentation here.
Not much new information was forthcoming about the merger or the 2014 season. The "moral imperative" of "getting it right" was re-iterated. We won't hear much solid new information until the Daytona 24 in January.
There was some good news for endurance racing last week: teams running Lola cars may actually have hope for spare parts and race support. Multimatic Engineering and Haas Auto have licensed Lola intellectual property and acquired the physical assets of Lola Cars. After watching Patrick Dempsey's shunt on Saturday, I would say he needs more than a few spares ASAP.
Let's hope that the 2013 season, ALMS's last, will be a banner one.
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