If only the winners ran, the interest would be sparse.
Witness the LeMons races, which has an Effluency Index.
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Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Index of Effluency (or IOE) is the top prize awarded in the 24 Hours of LeMons automotive racing series. General criteria to win this award is a car that is too unreliable to be driven effectively on the streets yet manages to complete a decent number of laps on the race track. IOE can be awarded to a vehicle that was deemed unreliable from the factory (e.g. Volkswagen Karmann Ghia) or a more reliable car with an unwise engine transplant (e.g. Ford Thunderbird with a BMW diesel engine). The award is named after the "Index of Thermal Efficiency", a prize briefly given in LeMons' namesake the 24 Hours of Le Mans to the car that scored the highest based on a complex formula that took into account car weight, fuel usage and average speed.
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https://jalopnik.com: This Weird Panhard Is The King of Le Mans Efficiency
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The Mk1 Ford GT40 was introduced to Le Mans in 1964. That’s something you immediately think of as having a low slung and slippery shape, right? That car with its “Le Mans nose” is quoted as having a coefficient of drag in the 0.35 range. What did this little Panhard streamliner achieve? Its coefficient of drag is a Le Mans record of 0.12. That’s absurdly low!
So we’ve established that the CD LM64 is extremely aerodynamically efficient. It was also extremely light weight at just 1230 pounds. Add in a supercharged 848cc flat-twin engine with 78 horsepower and you get a car that can run at 137 MPH at flat chat.
While I realize how incredibly dangerous it would be for such a thing to exist in 2019, I would have loved to have seen a modern streamliner out on track this weekend with a 250cc motorcycle engine revving to 19,000 rpm and a hybrid electric motor and active aero getting 60 miles per gallon or something equally absurd in race trim.
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