Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Paolo Flammini BY ALAN CATHCART PHOTOS BY KEL EDGE his year sees a raillcal overhaul of the World Endurance Championship, until now mainly an attempt by the FIM to wrap the three stand-alone Francophone 24-hour marathons held each year at Le Mans, Spa-Francorchamps and the Bol d'Or together with the series of 45-minute sprint races the Suzuka 8-Hours has come to represent, into a single, rather disjointed World Series whose whole most definitely never equaled the sum of its parts. More enthusiasts around the world would be able to name the winners of Suzuka or the Bol d'Or last year than they could the 2001 World Endurance Champions - which is why Octagon Motorsports, promotors of the World Superbike Series, have taken long-distance racing under their control and radically revamped it for 2002. The resultant six-race calendar includes Suzuka, but, controversially, does not count any of the three Francophone 24-hour races in its schedule: instead, they have banded together to create a so-called 'Master of Endurance' series organized without FIM approval - though at the moment without any sanctions applied against them by the sport's governing body. Instead, the official World Endurance Championship opens in Italy in a week Oust two weeks 50 MAY 1, 2002' cue • e n .. wv s after the Le Mans 24-Hours) with the revival of one of the most historic races in the racing calendar, the Imola 200. This TV-friendly event is one of three 200-mile races on the 2002 World Endurance calendar, followed by the one at Silverstone on May 19, one week before the new World Superbike round at the same British circuit. On June 16, the series moves to the Czech Republic, for the Brno 6Hour race, followed by the Suzuka 8-Hours, on August 4. The fact that it's not anticipated that many, if any, of the teams contesting the World Endurance title will compete in Japan is underlined by the fact that the longest race of the season-long World Series takes place the weekend following Suzuka the 24-Hours of Oschersleben in Eastern Germany is held on August 11 before the series wraps up back in Italy once again, with a 200-mile race at the Vallelunga circuit just north of Rome, on October 6. This essentially European-based series evidently represents a new approach to World Endurance, with the shorter races indicating a change of strategy in promoting the championship. To find out more about it, I visited Octagon Motorsports' World Superbike supremo Paolo Flammini in his Rome office to quiz him about the future of long-distance racing at the world level. Why did Octagon assume responsibility for promotjng the World Endurance Championship in 2000, and what is the basis of your deal with the AM? We did it mainly for three reasons. One, Endurance racing is reserved for productionbased machines, therefore, since as promoters of the World Superbike Championship we at Octagon have a responsibility for the Superbike concept, we felt it was important for us to develop the Endurance Series as well. Secondly, the Octagon Group wishes to develop its presence in the twowheeled motorsports sector, and to assume responsibility for a second World Championship series was an important part of that strategy. And finally, until now, the World Endurance Series was never managed centrally as a single, combined entity, but consisted previously of a collection of individual races whose organizers banded together in a loose confederation, with the result that this branch of road racing was never properly promoted outside France - and I include the Spa 24 Hours as a French race. We therefore felt there was potential to develop a better series if one central promoter was to take care of the championship. These three reasons convinced us there was a chance for us to create something really worthwhile in World Endurance, so we made a deal with the FIM to pro- A

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