Of course you know, this means war

…said the great philosopher Groucho Marx.

Through a somewhat odd approach, with an email press release sent to everyone under the sun this Thursday, the new-for-2015 TC3 International Series came to light.

We spent of an evening of digging around trying to find out as much as we can, as after all, it’s not the first time a new series has announced its plans to us this way. Are we in the second season of the reborn Japanese Touring Car Championship yet? How’s that DTM America championship coming along? Which has so far been delayed more times than the expected completion date of my local road works. We’re still waiting for further word on South Africa’s GTC series as well, coming in 2014….well, six months left, hurry up!

The bit that spun us out the most was the part that mentions that this new TC3 championship would be on the Formula 1 supporting package. That, combined with the words ‘affordable’ appeared to be an oxymoron. We’ve heard that the World Touring Car Championship, which IS an FIA Championship, has been struggling enough to justify appearing on the support bill of just one Formula 1 race, let alone appearing on several, so our first thoughts were what madman came up with this, and is it a hoax?

Given that this ‘hoax’ had started work back in February, it didn’t seem likely that it what it was, and it tied in very nicely with the time scale of development of the rumoured Marcello Lotti runaway series. The Italian, who ran the WTCC all the way from 2005 up until the end of 2013, as well as the preceding European Touring Car Championship, was known to be working on ‘something’ for 2015, but no one knew what. Indeed, in reality, we still don’t know much of what, but at least we know a little more and where he’s aiming for it to sit.

It’s a self-described international championship, with ten events, over four continents, with a performance balancing system as well as an Asian series.

The first three points match with the WTCC exactly, though those that have been watching Citroen clean up so far this year will be aware that as an FIA championship, there’s not a lot of performance balancing going on, just the compensation weight, which is just meant to mix things up a little, not neutralise performance differences between the cars.

Lotti and Nunzia Corvina, his right-hand assistant, both left the series quietly over the off season. There were rumours of his impending departure at Macau last year, but these were quickly denied. I guess that was the giveaway.

The WTCC has still never officially announced the new management structure, or the reasons for the split. Francois Ribeiro, who has spearheaded the work in recent years on the FIA European Rally Championship for the promotor’s Eurosport Events, and former Chevrolet Motorsport boss and HWA board member Eric Néve, were both appointed by Eurosport Events as ‘Motorsport Manager’ and ‘General Consultant’ to replace both Lotti, the General Manager of the WTCC, and Jean-Louis Dauger, the Director of Operations at Eurosport Events, who had left to join Onroak Automotive, the large French sports car operation soon after the season finale.

Lotti’s series poses a risk to the WTCC, but will still need the FIA to function. As an international series, its calendar will require FIA approval, though it clearly won’t be an FIA badged series like the WTCC and ETCC are.

Lotti’s series isn’t the only international championship set to pop up next year either. Daniele Audetto’s Pan Asian Racing Enterprise’s big plan replacement for the Superstars Series, initially titled the SuperTouringSeries, is set to spring into action as well, and will bear little in relation to the one-year only EUROV8 SERIES, which is running in a holding pattern for the teams and drivers in a subdued capacity until that series launches next year.

Is there enough room for another international motorsport series? Aren’t there enough already?

Well, it depends who you ask. Certainly Lotti’s approach was different to that of the current management, always of course courting manufacturers, which are vital to the success of an international motorsport championship, but he also always balanced the needs of the independent teams which had supported the championship from the beginning.

Since the WTCC began in 2005, every manufacturer that was there at the start has gone, with BMW, Alfa Romeo, Chevrolet and SEAT slowly swapping over to the Lada, Honda and Citroen mix we have now, but only when the new Super 2000 TC1 cars came into play, some would argue at the demand of Citroen, for 2014, we saw a few of the independent teams such as Wiechers-Sport and Bamboo Engineering forced out, with Engstler Motorsport likely to be forced out at the end of this year when TC2 (the 2013-spec cars) are officially outlawed and only eligible for the ETCC.

So, will this new series be mainly populated by independent teams? Will there be manufacturer involvement? If so, presumably they won’t have to spend the multi-millions that it now would take to compete against a manufacturer such as Citroen, which have thrown the piggy bank against the WTCC and come out laughing, leaving Honda a bit shell shocked and Lada limping behind like a wounded dog.

It’s not clear yet, but there have been many WTCC drivers and teams, well, ex-WTCC drivers and teams, saying that WTCC is now completely unaffordable for them and they need to wait a few years for the new cars to bed in and come down in cost. However, with Lotti’s series popping up next year, there’s another option for them, after all, Citroen have still not confirmed they’ll even be providing customer cars next year, which will certainly be most teams preferred choice before asking Honda if they’re able to provide any more, with Honda already committed to supporting Zengo Motorsport, Proteam Racing and NIKA Racing next season.

The RML Chevrolets of course will still be there and are basically the non-manufacturer option, instead dealing with a British team instead of a marque, albeit with a car model which will soon both no longer be sold in Europe or even in production when the new Cruze comes online late next year.

Whatever happens, the WTCC will still be the main global touring car championship – although in many circles, it has to compete against Germany’s DTM for the prestige of being considered such, then there’s Australia’s V8 Supercars Championship, which actually boasts more manufacturers than each of them. Unlike this time last year, it’s been relatively quiet in regards to what manufacturers in talks to join the Championship, with just a handful of unconfirmed rumours so far, and there’s no doubting that the Championship needs someone to take the fight to Citroën . Citroën want to be challenged as well, and whether that comes from Honda stepping up to the fight once they’ve had a chance to catch up with the development of the Civic, or from a new manufacturer, remains to be seen.

If Citroën keep walking away with it, it’s certain some people will walk away from watching it, not content with an inner team battle no matter how close it is, and a Lotti-run ‘performance balanced’ championship, with low costs, and committed and supported independent teams, despite all the headaches that entails, might just be where they walk to when the manufacturers start to roll out that often seen saying, “we have achieved all our objectives in this series and it’s time to move on…”

2015 should be interesting to say the least.