Thank Frankel It's Friday– The Golden Age Of WEC? It's Right Now

Usually when one car or marque enjoys total dominance of a series, as Porsche did then and as Mercedes does in F1 today, usually the loudest noise from the crowd is not applause but mutters of disgruntlement.

The only time I knew I was watching history unfurl before me was in the late 1980s when Jaguar and Sauber-Mercedes contrived to end what at times had appeared to be Porsche’s impregnable grip on sports car racing. I can remember going to Le Mans every year, watching them all, mixed with thundering Astons and wailing Mazdas and realizing this was genuinely special and that it wouldn’t last for long. And for once I was right.

But I’ve got that feeling again about sports car racing, and await this weekend’s opening round of the World Endurance Championship at Silverstone with greater anticipation than the Monaco, Belgian and Japanese Grands Prix combined.

What we currently have in sports car racing are cars that are genuinely as quick as lower order F1 machines, yet which will last 24 hours. We also have a rulebook that far from designing 95 per cent of the car for you, permits engineers to choose between petrol, diesel and hybrid power, front, rear or all wheel drive, front or mid engine locations and engines with as many cylinders and in whatever configuration you choose. Cleverly the rules are evolving at a rate that means all regulatory attempts to slow the cars are offset almost exactly by engineers finding ever more clever ways of finding a bit more downforce here, a bit more energy there. This time last year Mark Webber told me his Porsche 919 had over 1000bhp for over 80 per cent of the Silverstone lap.

Importantly, the cars are not only quick, crucially they look quick too. If you’re able, go onto Eurosport this weekend and watch the quick prototypes through the Maggotts and Becketts complex. They look impressively rapid right up to the moment they chance across a GTE competitor in a road derived design like a Porsche 911, and then as they flick, dart and dance around them, you realise just how unbelievably, unfeasibly fast the prototypes really are. Indeed, my favourite moment of the entire working year which doesn’t involve having a steering wheel in my hands is dawn on Sunday morning at Le Mans when I walk down to the Porsche curves and watch the survivors. They change directions like fighter planes. It’s as close as I’ve seen a car come to defying physical law.

This year we see three factory teams – Porsche, Audi and Toyota – with the latter looking very much like it is back up to speed after a perplexing loss of form last year. The competition will be red hot not just here but in the hotly contested LMP2 category and among the GT cars too, where Ford’s new GT will be aiming to recapture the 1960s glory days of GT40.

Of course the show could be further improved by letting McLaren, Bentley, Nissan, BMW and others race their GT3 cars there but perhaps now is not the time to carp. Now is the time to get out there and watch some racing. And then, 10 or 20 years from now when sports car racing has slipped back into the doldrums (for the sport has been cyclical in nature since the start), you’ll be able to look back and think ‘I was there’ and realise just how special a period it was and how lucky you were to witness it first hand.