RACER recently spoke with IMSA CEO Scott Atherton on the conclusion to the inaugural TUDOR United SportsCar Championship season, his views on the series’ four classes, its television package and his thoughts on the recent rise of the Pirelli World Challenge series.

MARSHALL PRUETT: It’s a bit of a softball to start the conversation, but after the turmoil that opened the season, the series continues to move in a stronger direction and appears to have every chance of ending the year on a high note.

SCOTT ATHERTON: Generally, I would agree with that statement – it’s trending in the right direction. We gave ourselves some significant challenges right out of the gate. It’s challenging enough to be in a debut season with a new merged property that has taken diverse cultures and diverse rulebooks and – and almost – one of the most extremely difficult processes of all time in motorsport to balance the performance of a Daytona Prototype and an LMP2 car.

But as you look to the second half of the season with not only the AoP elements, which typically are the focus of many a conversation, I think we’re in a better place now than we have been at any point before. I believe as close as humanly possible. And for us to continue to adjust, I think, would be taking it away from where it should be. And what I mean by that comment is I don’t ever want the situation to be that if you don’t win, regardless of the circumstances, the automatic knee-jerk reaction is something is wrong with the adjustment of performance. There have been times this year when I felt like that’s the mode that we’ve been in. I don’t feel that way now.

But to continue in a whole different area of discussion, if you take today as the example, because it really is the first time that we have been in a racing setting with the new players that we’ve named to the team, to have Simon Hodgson in the position that he’s in, looking after all of the competition and operation related aspects of our business, to have Beaux Barfield in as the race director, to have recast Scot Elkins’ and Paul Walters’ roles in such a way that it focuses on the things that they are clearly the best in doing, it’s changed the vibe inside the office in Daytona. It’s probably too early to make that claim about the paddock, but I think in the not distant future that same effect that we’ve seen inside the office we’ll be seeing in the paddock as well. So with that said, ending the season in that way I believe positions us well for the future.

MP: Television is a constant topic of conversation among teams and manufacturers. Ratings on cable, for every road racing series, including IndyCar, tend to be rather small, and with some of IMSA’s races on FOX Sports 2, the numbers are even smaller. How do you improve those numbers going forward, and do you see the opportunities to have IMSA races rebroadcast on big FOX as an effective workaround to give sponsors and manufacturers the ratings they need?

SA: If you look at the goal that we have, which is to not only serve our core audience with the best possible opportunities to watch, listen – live timing and scoring, in-car cameras, of course, and a live television broadcast – we also have a responsibility and a goal to broaden the audience beyond the center core of our most ardent fans. And I think the FOX Network television opportunity gives us that chance, such that someone that’s either just coming out of the NFL broadcast on a Sunday, which the majority of the country, will be able to see our product.

We are thrilled with the cooperation and the support that we’ve seen. There was nothing that required them to put the TUDOR Championship on the FOX Network [again] on Sunday. For them to have made this opportunity available to us [at COTA] and at Petit Le Mans is a tremendous opportunity and one that we believe all of our stakeholders, from the center of the core of our fan base to all of the OEM and marketing partners that make these TV broadcasts possible, everybody’s going to benefit from this.

How is it going for next year? Next year is still a work in progress in terms of nailing down the granular details of the broadcast, but I think it will be an improvement over what we had this year. I can’t confirm this today, but I think all of our races will be either live on FOX Sports 1 or a portion of them on FOX Sports 1. When you have a 24-hour race, when you have a 12-hour race, when you have a 10-hour race, there’s no way that those races in their entirety are going to be on TV. So there will be a blended mix. Live streaming when there is no television coverage, and FOX Sports 1 and FOX Sports 2 for the longer races.

MP: Let’s look at the individual classes and how they’ve fared this year. Prototype has been a political battlefield between DPs and P2s in terms of BoP, but things definitely continue to get closer in that regard. Can it get closer, though, so we see a genuine 50/50 chance of winning at any track? The win numbers are obviously skewed in one direction – other than tipping the BoP the other direction to give P2 manufacturers more wins and more ammo to sell their new coupes, I’m not sure how this gets resolved.

SA: Tough question simply because you’re right, at least on paper, when you refer to the actual results. I think Scot Elkins and his team have been nothing short of brilliant on balancing these two cars. And the data would suggest that it’s not humanly possible to get them more closely aligned. I know that every team that’s racing a P2 would say, yeah, for one lap on a clean track we can lay down the same time. But in a racing situation, because of the fundamental architectural differences of the cars, it negates that ability or it depletes that ability such that they’re ultimately not as competitive as what the data would suggest.

It’s tough to come in there with a magic wand and make that situation better, short of doing what you described, which would be to over-dog the P2 car just to prove a point and help P2 manufacturers line up customers for the new coupes next year. That would destroy the integrity of the entire system. First of all, Elkins would never agree to it because it completely violates the moral code that he operates by. No one would ever suggest that.

I think there’s more to the equation than just the BoP. There’s so many variables that come into play here. There’ve been, as you know, several near misses, where it could have easily been a P2 car that won the race. It was a pit stop strategy issue, it was a driver error, or something else that prevented the car from winning. I also think there are more DPs than there are P2s, so right there you have an economy of scale such that there is more opportunity for those cars to win.

I don’t say that to suggest that we are satisfied with the results. And I think if Jim France or Ed Bennett were sitting in the room they would be nodding their head in agreement right now as well. But no one wants this platform to be skewed one way or the other. You want to have any of our events be completely up for grabs, whether it’s a P2 car or a Daytona Prototype car or DeltaWing.

MP: Of the four classes, PC has been the biggest disappointment for me, and I say that in terms of its health. It’s the one class I use to gauge the level of business engagement in the series – the number of gentleman drivers coming in and spending money to keep the BAR1’s and Performance Tech’s on the track. We saw a lot of PC cars when we opened the season, but since then, the numbers have either declined or the number of season-long drivers has become a bit of a rotating cast. Is there anything the series can do to bring more stability to the class?

SA: I think it has been, it is and it will continue to be the best value in sports car racing. The combination of the car, the reliability and the relatively low operating cost associated with it make it a tremendous value. The driving experience – it’s a proper prototype that delivers a prototype experience whether you’re a Pro or an Am. I think there’s been some self-inflicted challenges in that class this year. We deliberately went out as early as possible announcing our 2015 schedule back at Road America. And at the same time announcing that platform is locked and loaded, stable, through ’16, such that there was speculation – I’ve heard it many times – that it’s just a slow progression until we phase it out, that we are not committed to it, that some people in Daytona, or wherever, have decided that that car is not part of the future and therefore let’s make other decisions accordingly. Fundamentally, categorically, it’s not true. The whole goal of getting out as early as we did with very defined direction was to enable the Brian Alders of the grid to put their programs together for next year, knowing what they have to sell.

There’s one variable right now that we haven’t confirmed and that is how will we treat the VIR weekend. That’s really the only variable. Obviously, we’re not going back to Kansas City. It depends on who you talk to about how things went this year at VIR. Some are outspoken in their opposition to repeating that. To others, it was a good weekend. We haven’t made those decisions ourselves and I think that’s the only variable that remains in PC. I would be surprised, given the calendar and the commitment that we’ve made, if the category doesn’t recover to its full capacity.

MP: The GTLM class is IMSA’s shining example of what’s great about manufacturer-based sports car competition – there’s not much to review there, in my opinion. That leaves us with GTD, and there’s an odd transition year coming with GT3 becoming the sole specification for 2016. It’s also a great class with tons of manufacturer involvement, but for those entrants with cars that aren’t rooted in GT3 – specifically Porsche 911 GT America owners, they have some hard decisions to make. They make up about half of the GTD class – is there anything you can do to make sure you hold onto those owners and keep them engaged?

SA: It’s a difficult task because you’ve got some very diverse platforms there. We’ve got essentially all FIA GT3 spec stock with one exception: Porsche. It complicates an already complicated process just by virtue of the different architecture that’s represented in that class. But when you have one example that is not from its origin, not built to the same specification as the others, it’s difficult. And the goal here is to provide, not just hope, but provide peace of mind that all of these cars are going to be competitive. The latest round of BoP changes were done to make sure the Porsches and all the other GTD cars are as close as possible for the final two races of this year and that would then carry over into next year. That’s the immediate focus – to ensure all of the cars race as competitively as they can through 2015, and then we’ll go through the full FIA GT3 move the following season.

MP: The World Challenge series has seen a lot of ups and downs in recent years, and they’re definitely on an upswing right now. I’ve always thought of the series as a definite step below the ALMS, Grand-Am, and now the TUDOR series, but I must admit, this is the first season where I’ve seen PWC step out of the shadows and make a case for being near – not necessarily eye level – but a lot closer to the top sports car series than I’ve ever seen. How do you view them? Rivals? Direct competition?

SA: At my core, I’m a sports car fan. So I like watching sports car racing and I like watching all forms. To suggest that they are a competitor I think would be a misnomer, and I hope they would say the same thing about the TUDOR Championship. The majority of their venues, they are – and I say this with respect, but they’re a support race for IndyCar. And I think it’s smart on their part to position themselves that way because they have access to some high-profile events and a crowd that is already there, not only to see their content but probably the majority are there for the A show. It makes sense from a TV perspective as well, the way they’ve aligned. So they’ve done some smart business choices. But I don’t believe and I never thought of them, and even now still don’t see them, as a peer or a competitor.

Our races, with the exception of the two street circuits that we share, are all standalone; we are the franchise. An endurance-based series versus a sprint race-based series. Single drivers, 45-minute races, no pit stops, if that’s one extreme, we are at the other end of the spectrum. 24-hour races, 12-hour races, 10-hour race, six-hour races, every race with multiple drivers, multiple pit stops. Factory teams that are true factory programs with professional drivers and professional teams that have direct links not only to our championship but to Le Mans.

I know that they’ve announced the intention to do some standalone weekends. That’s a big change. And I think they will find out, in some ways, how difficult that is. It’s challenging for everybody.

It’s kind of humorous in some respects and it’s frustrating in others that for years team owners, drivers, in some cases promoters, would try to play the American Le Mans Series against Grand-Am. You know, ‘If you don’t do this, this and that, I’m packing up my gear and I’m going over there.’ And when I sit down and talk to Jim France and Ed Bennett, we laugh about it now because many of those same personalities were telling them, ‘If you don’t do this, this and that, I’m packing up my gear and I’m going over there.’

So here we are in the debut season of the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship. Sports car racing is finally unified under a single banner here in North America. And yet, before the first season is completed, you are starting to hear the same comments. You know, if this doesn’t happen, then I’m going to go World Challenge racing. I don’t know if World Challenge hears the same thing because it’s very easy for a TUDOR Championship team to go sprint racing with no pit stops and a single driver. It’s a much more onerous task for a World Challenge team to say, I’m upset with the way things are operating here, I’m going to go do the TUDOR Championship.

As I say, it’s humorous in some respects because I thought we put that to rest when we merged Grand-Am and ALMS together. But it’s the nature of the business that we are in. I’m not staying awake at night wondering what World Challenge is going to do. Our focus is solely on making the best decisions on and off the racetrack that we can for the future of IMSA and the TUDOR Championship.