Glickenhaus Still Doesn't Have Enough Funding To Fly To The Middle East Or Japan
Now at the end of its third season in the World Endurance Championship, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus seems to be fairing no better than it did in its rookie season. The team ran a single car in the series this year, with a second customer car joining for Le Mans. As with previous seasons, SCG has skipped the flyaway Middle East and Asian rounds citing prohibitive costs and a lack of sponsorship. This is an extremely competitive global series, and SCG’s commitment is half-assed at best.
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Funding is limited, results are few, and the compromised non-hybrid design of the under-developed SCG 007 LMH is making pace difficult to find. The team found a pair of podiums in 2022, finishing well behind the only other LMH class competing Toyotas. In 2023, however, it is getting handily trounced by new factory efforts from Porsche, Ferrari, Peugeot, and Cadillac, in addition to the Toyotas. SCG has seen a season-best finish of sixth at Le Mans.
In early 2023 Jim Glickenhaus said, “For us, the WEC is becoming less and less meaningful because it is becoming very difficult to find customers to run a car, unlike the Baja and the Nürburgring. I don’t know what the future will bring but we are slowly heading towards the end.” It seems like he hasn’t had his heart in it all year, so who knows if the car will even return for 2024.
This is a team that seems intent on ghosting the championship. To bow out without so much as making a mark is an indignity I wouldn’t want to suffer if I were Jim Glickenhaus. All he’s seemed to do over the last few years is complain about the balance of performance, complain that the series isn’t working harder to attract Coca Cola or Amazon into the paddock, and run a car a few percentage points off the pace. I truly hope Olivier Pla, Ryan Briscoe, and Romain Dumas have been paid well for their time in the car, because their careers have been left to rot on the vine while running around in a team not worthy of its competition.
For a team that started out running a weird but wonderful Nürburgring 24 effort and actually managing to make it work, SCG has squandered a lot of its fan goodwill in the WEC. Glickenhaus fancies himself a modern-day Enzo Ferrari, but his race cars have yet to actually put his name on the map of international competition. If the team doesn’t come back next year with a better effort and a better attitude, I fear it’ll be washed into the sands of time by the crashing waves of racing progress. A small team just can’t hope to hold their own against factory efforts, especially when they run a half-baked car and don’t commit to the whole series.
If this is, in fact, the end for SCG in the WEC, then good riddance.
