There are damn few things that’ll get me out of bed at 0530h on a Saturday morning.  One of them is a fire alarm; another is an early flight home for the holidays.  Next week it may be a charity clothing drive at my father’s church.  Today it was the start of the 77th 24 Heures du Mans.

What I find particularly compelling about Le Mans-style sports car racing isn’t just the technological sophistication of the cars — particularly the prototypes, of course, but every car in the 24H strikes a fascinating balance between outright speed, maximal traction, and easily-serviced robustness.  (I doubt you’ll see any other class of car that can hit 210mph in a straight line, corner well above 3.5G, and undergo a full engine swap in under 7 minutes all in the same configuration.)  It’s not just the variety of competitive cars — while the front rank of the LMP1 class is turning into all-diesels all-the-time, it beats the hell out of spec series like NASCAR’s Sprint Cup and, well, damn near everything else besides Formula One.  It’s also the fact that, as Dave Despain noted around 10 hours into the race in the SpeedTV colour commentary, the Le Mans series are particularly relevant to motorsports as a whole — and to motor vehicles as a whole.

I’ve already mentioned that the dominance of big diesel engines in the premier class of LM racing stems from the series’ focus on fuel economy as well as outright performance — this year one the big stories is the degree to which the Audi and Peugeot LMP1 diesels continue to outclass the gasoline-powered LMP1s despite being gimped by the regulations.  I’ve also noted that Audi’s LMS-motivated engine development has directly resulted in roughly a 10% improvement in the efficiency of all of its production-car engines.  This year’s take-away comment from Le Mans comes from Jake Corvette Racing’s Steve Wesoloski (I think), who took a good five minutes — that’s a lap and a half around the Circuit de la Sarthe, by the way — simply to list the technologies being developed by the C6.R programme which are on the way to production ‘vettes.  (He was also careful to mention that Corvette Racing has a cost:benefit ratio less than one, although I doubt that any of his new benevolent overlords in government were watching.)  Do you want ceramic wheel bearings that offer an essentially free decrease in rolling resistance?  I sure do.

Gordon Kirby has been complaining about spec cars of late, particularly of their tendency to make the spectacle of racing far less entertaining.  I submit that relevance is another casualty of spec car encroachment: if your “Impala SS” Sprint Cup car is nothing more than a homologated Car of Tomorrow with a carefully-regulated spec engine within, the nameplate becomes a joke.  Maybe the jaded fans of NASCAR will join the Formula One exponents who, like yours truly, are sick of the bickering between Max, The Bernie, and the FOTA — and we can all enjoy a good season of multiclass sports car racing next year.

(Particularly if the rumours SpeedTV reported are true and both Ferrari and Porsche are looking for a way back into LMP1!)