How is WEC doing it financially?
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I’ve been following WEC this year so far and really appreciate how beautiful LMP cars are. I mostly put it down to development freedom that’s allowed. Like everybody else here I quickly started comparing it to F1 and realized I know very little about financial side to WEC.
Could someone who looked at this explain how WEC series manages to allow LMP1 and to some degree LMP2 teams so much technological freedom and yet make it worthwhile for them? I imagine Porsche, Toyota, Audi and Nissan spend a lot more than an average team in F1 yet I imagine prize money is lower. How is WEC being financed in general? Sponsors? Imagines less so than F1. TV rights? – can’t be much – in UK Eurosport doesn’t even need SKy Sports subscription. Global audience numbers… I can’t see this being high given it takes a particular kind of viewer to follow 24hr of motor racing. Is brand exposure really that valuable for those teams to pay so much? What else is there?
I don’t know much about it either, but I know that the prize money for winning Le Mans is so ridiculously low it is essentially just a symbolic prize. Then again, winning Le Mans is a marketing gold mine so for companies such as Volkswagen it’s definitely worth throwing a lot of money at.
Average spending to win Le Mans is around 100milj whilst the prize money is 40k per driver and a Rolex watch. Hardly a solid return but we all know the group of legends you join when winning Le Mans.
Due to the freedom they give the manufactors can test what they want to test and get pr from it.
if the manufactor isn’t interested in a V6 turbo the data they get from F1 is worthless.
Wec cares about it fans F1 only cares about 70 years old with rolex.
You can get a grid walk on raceday for €30 for f1 you need to pay €4150In the end it surprises me we only have four brands in the LMP1 category.
I think manufacturers like Mercedes or Renault would have so much more to gain from WEC than F1, especially considering how much PR Audi gets from it. Ferrari seems to be the exception as their last success on the french track was in the sixties whilst everyone vividly remember the Schumacher era.
Although saying that Audi was able to profit from a few slow years winning a couple of Le Mans in a row. Had Porsche for example never stopped in ’98 basically giving Audi room to play with who knows how many Audi actually would have won. Telling is the BMW in ’99, the Bentley ’03 and Peugeot ’09 proved a challenge on only those three occasions.
@ porche F1 the Bentley was run by the audi factory team it was a bentley in name only
for most of the years Peugeot had a better car in 2007 Audi only won Le mans (due to rain) and silverstone (Peugeot driver made stupid crashes).The Dutch Eurosport commentators had an interesting take on it, namely saying that they’re partaking in Le Mans/WEC instead of other forms of marketing. The returns you get on marketing in any shape or form are hard to determine (especially globally, it’s actually easy to see if you have one store, take out one ad in one newspaper for one period, but I digress). Essentially, by partaking in this sport you’re marketing your brand, which will lead more people to your brand and perhaps more importantly, affirm people’s positive opinion of your brand.
It’s very difficult to actually get someone to buy your expensive, durable product, with just advertisement, but if you already own an Audi, they win Le Mans 13 times, you’re a lot more likely to buy another Audi and recommend them to your mates, than anyone going out and buying 3 Porsches just because they won Le Mans, however it could influence your opinion on the purchase.
Again, it’ll be difficult to express the exact monetary return on investment, but it’s not as if WEC works teams are throwing their money into a ditch.
The prize money in F1 might be bigger for the constructors but the prize of having an F1 team is also three times as big.
The problem with WEC ist, that the LMP1 class is de facto for car companies, so if Audis, Porsches and so on decide to pull the plug, the privateers cannot step up and fill the gap as now there is only the Rebellion and ByKolles team, they would have to promote the LMP2 class to LMP1 or so like in the past.
I think that is a reason why they start a test restriction for the next season.
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