OK, so the easiest way to watch depends on whether you have Sky or not. If not, then the best (legal) way is to stream from the official website - membership is ~£25 per year IIRC. Quality is generally good, but I found it could be flaky at times. I hope they've upgraded the servers this year. Otherwise I believe it's broadcast on Eurosport, so BT Sport or Sky will give you the goods. Motors TV have also done it in the past, so there should be options in any case.
As for the WEC itself, there's 5 classes:
- LMP1-H - this is the manufacturer/works team class - hybrid powertrains regularly producing in excess of 1,000 bhp. Porsche won last year, Toyota the year before and Audi the year before that, so should be close.
- LMP1 Privateer - essentially LMP1-H but with no hybrid tech to keep the costs down. Only Rebellion and ByKolles this year, but should grow in 2017.
- LMP2 - most teams run customer chassis and the vast majority run Nissan engines. New regulations mean that open top LMP2 cars will be rare (or homologated out this year?). There must be one amateur driver in the line up.
- GTE Pro - essentially GT3 cars which are road-car based (including the engine in theory, BMW Z4 excepted). The drivers are generally all professional (there's a driver grading system which isn't worth going into here)
- GTE Am - same cars as above (or perhaps one season older?), but the driver line up can only contain one professional driver
All cars have 3 drivers, and there can limitations on the talent in the cars as above. Drivers are rated Bronze, Silver and Gold, essentially a scale of amateur to professional. This can cause controversy.
The other element impacting on the classes is balance of performance or BoP. To enable significantly different cars to run in GTE (where everything from a BMW M6 to Ferrari 488s will be running), the cars are balanced using additional weight or engine restrictors, or both, to achieve the same overall lap time. This system is also used in LMP1 and LMP2, but not to the same extent as the cars are more homogeneous.
The race format is 6 hour endurance races, excepting Le Mans where the race is 24 hours (of course) and double points are scored. Le Mans (and frequently Spa, the race before) has a larger grid (traditionally 56 entrants), made up from invitations for champions of other endurance series, like the ELMS, American Le Mans Series, Asian Le Mans Series and so on.
Calendar is:
- 17th April - Silverstone
- 7th May - Circuit de Spa Francorchamps
- 18th-19th June - Le Mans
- 24th July - Nurburgring
- 3rd September - Mexico
- 17th September - Circuit of the Americas
- 16th October - Fuji
- 6th November - Shanghai
- 19th November - Bahrain
The Qualifying format uses an aggregate of two driver's two best laps within a set time period (meaning that within a 20 minute period the first driver has to go out and set two laps, then come in for a driver change, so the second guy can do likewise). The idea is to introduce an element of consistency into the qualifying, as you'll be needing that in the race as well.
