Motorsport 2014 (nyoom)

[Davidizer13]

With the South American Dakar Rally in progress, and with F1 testing and the 24 Hours of Daytona coming up in a couple weeks, it's time to declare the 2014 racing season open for business. And if you're going to pick a year to check out racing in general, this would be a good one, with IndyCar an V8 Supercars (now with Volvos!) remaining consistently exciting, all sorts of rule changes causing major shakeups in Formula 1, the merger of the two US endurance cups, and the all-electric Formula E debuting late in the year, along with all the other yearly events and all manner of series to follow, each with their own dramas and battles.

Speaking of drama, let's talk about the United SportsCar Championship, which will be running the aforementioned 24 Hours of Daytona to start its season on the 25th-26th. Endurance and sports car racing is a mess of classes and all sorts of different cars on the road at the best of times, but in USCC, they've mashed up two different series' (American Le Mans Series and the Rolex Grand-Am Series) barely comparable classes into four goofy new classes where nobody has any guess who's going to win the championship in any of them. And who can blame them? The top class is made out of three different types of cars (ALMS P2, Rolex's Daytona Prototypes, and the experimental Nissan DeltaWing) they're trying to squeeze into parity, and the two GT classes are even worse. (The upper is from ALMS and is equivalent to the FIA's GTE class, which would be easy enough; the lower is from the Grand-Am GT and GX classes, combined with ALMS' Porsche GT3 cup, and as a whole falls closer to FIA's GT3. Also, some of the same models of cars race in both classes, differentiated only by their mechanical bits. Good luck keeping all that straight over a 12-hour race!) If you've got the patience for endurance racing, this could shape up to be the most fun series to watch for it.