Asian Le Mans Series Q&A: Building toward Fuji

With the opening round of the 2015-'16 Asian Le Mans Series drawing closer, DailySportsCar.com catches up with series operations manager Cyrille Taesch Wahlen – the man tasked with ensuring that the ACO’s youngest offshoot gets as good an opportunity as possible to succeed in what has proven to be a very tricky marketplace.

The series gets underway with a supporting role on the bill of the FIA WEC in Japan at Fuji International Speedway in October with a 2-hour race.

How are grid numbers looking for the season opener and beyond?

“We have 13 confirmed Full season entries for Fuji with the potential for a couple more to join us for the first race and others set to join us for the later rounds.”

Is that the level you expected?

“You always want more but we know there are issues with the first round. Being on the bill of the WEC brings advantages but there is a difficulty with its closeness to the season finale for the ELMS (which takes place the following weekend at Estoril) which prevented Algarve Pro Racing team to commit for the full season. So the ORECAs of Eurasia (Nissan engined) and Race Performance (Judd powered) will be in Japan and will be joined in the other three rounds by the Ligier Nissan of Algarve Pro Racing.

Is there any other LMP2 interest at this point?

“We are still talking to a number of other potential entrants but are happy to have at least three cars from Sepang in November onwards with the possibility of a fourth during the season.”

LMP3 is new for the 2015-'16 season. How are things looking on that front?

“Again, we have cars confirmed for Fuji, Team AAI will debut their pair of new Adess LMP3s and David Cheng has now announced that he will field his own team with a new Ligier JS P3. That’s a good start but we know that the planned EuroInternational effort will start in Sepang in November and there are other possibilities for additional cars after Japan.”

“It would be great to have a Ginetta joining the field. Thus we would have a competition between the three currently available LMP3 chassis.

“One knock-on effect that perhaps we didn’t anticipate with the coming of LMP3 was that many of the drivers that were looking at the series were waiting to see what happened with LMP3; some of them were close to teams that have CN cars available and that delay in making the decision meant that some of the interest went away. Once you lose one car in those circumstances and the timeline moves on, then others are less likely to commit.

“The net result is that from a position where we had a potential multi-car CN entry now we have none for Fuji. But I am still confident some will join during the course of the season.”

And GT?

“Pretty healthy – eight cars for Fuji with some already announced: Team AAI with two cars, a Spirit of Race Ferrari and several others including Nexus Infinity, ARC Bratislava, Clearwater Racing and Absolute Racing. There are other possible entries on a on-off basis for Fuji and others too that I think we’ll see for the two races in 2016.

Are you confident going forward?

“It is positive first step. This is a relaunch and we have to show our customers and partners that our, and their, commitment will pay dividends. The potential in Asia is clearly there we now have to learn more about how to unlock it.

“Having drivers and teams get the opportunity to experience Le Mans as Team AAI did this year is a big plus. We’re building slowly but surely but we are building.

“Moving on to the races in January you can expect to see a big step forward in promotion at the track when we headline our own race meetings.”

The Super GT organization has made it clear that it would like the opportunity to demonstrate its GT500 cars against the current crop of LMPs. That’s been counted out by the FIA WEC but is there a possibility of invitational entries in your series at Fuji?

“No, that’s not possible, certainly for the GT500s. We do have the option for GT300s to join the grid, as they have in the past in the Asian Le Mans series, but no – the GT500s won’t run with us.”

Originally on DailySportsCar.com