Okay, so finally decided to give my two cents here
I don't really like that rule forbiding to any ex-IGTC or MoE to take part on the GTAL TBH. Let's get clear, getting into the IGTC remains a great chance for "average" racers. Once you have it, you have to take it. But now, if for some reason, the race didn't get well for you, and no one in your team wants to give you another chance for 2010, that means you're out of the endurance scene for a whole year, and eventually more, as you're not welcome in the GTAL either. 1 year could seem to be not so much for some of you, but remember that for example it's a quarter of the age of the older LFS endurance league, MoE.
Even in real life motorsports, you have the right to not show up well at the pinacle without being rejected on the supports series. Just look at Pantano, Glock, Bruni, for example. All of them hadn't much success during their first attempt on Formula 1, but they had the opportunity to go back to GP2, with as a result for Glock, a full time F1 slot now. Now, I don't understand why on such an unforgivable environment, a second chance is given, whereas on LFS, there isn't.
If this sort of rejection is done to give a slot to the fresh new teams, I'd understand, but now, if you look closely, only 23-24 teams took part in each race, which means there's a lot of slots avilable, and this won't change for Season 2, seeing the way LFS stagnate on its developpement at the momment.
Now when I see that deko hopes to attract much more teams present on IGTC or MoE, to give more experience to their new members, no offenses, but I'm oblige to :rolleyes:. Let's get serious, managing a team, preserving the members' interrest and so on is damn' difficult on this kind of series. You can't say "We'll start the season with 3 guys and let's see how it goes". No. This doesn't work like that, and many drivers are obliged to pull over at some stage, because of familly commitements, or because they just got a chance to get into MoE/IGTC, or to get into a bigger team. That's why I'd say that 6 drivers should be enough to start a season if you take average guys. Now let's say that an average team counts 15 racers. If you start on the fact that 7 or 8 already raced on IGTC/MoE and that 4 or 5 cba/doesn't have enough time to do endurance, you only have 2 or 3 guys left for the GTAL. Just look at what happened to XFusion during this first season, or at TRDT's(which remain an endurance based team) withdraw before even the first round of the season. IMHO, only very big teams like ConeDodgers and Sonicrealms, can do both IGTC and the GTAL, just because of their epic amount of drivers they have inside of their team.
So, what I'd like to see, as a driver and as an ex endurance team-manager, is a softer rule on that point. As suggested before, a number of hours driven on IGTC seems to be a good thing, but IMHO there should be a distinction between the race winners and the rest of the field. An alien, who won once on IGTC out of the 2 races he took part, but cba to involve himself more in these series shouldn't be allowed to take part, while the average racer who took part in two races and finished 20th or so in both of them, and can't do more in the IGTC because someone else replaced him should IMO. Both of them drove the same amount of hours, but they are very different. That's why I'd like to see a limit of results, maybe something like 8th, which means you're out of the GTAL if you do better than that,
alongside of a maximum amount of races driven, maybe something like 4 or so.