£5m is a lot for a car. And it's a sum which becomes even more painful when you consider you'd need to heavily rework it to homologate it for GT3 or GTE spec, to the point where it's barely recognisable as the donor car.
Then consider you could just buy a race-ready GT3 car off the shelf, with factory support and plentiful parts availability, for just over half a million and the sums really don't add up at all.
It's more a comment about how the original drafts of the Hypercar rules (pre LMH and pre-convergence) set out with the very intent of getting this type of vehicle to race at Le Mans in a sort of LMGT1 revival. It obviously did not work, and we've now arrived at a sort of DPi 2.0 with BoP'd LMP1 follow on.
Porsche's 963 LMDh is offered to customers at $2.9m. Glickenhaus think they can sell their LMH to customers for $2.5m. This RB17 car will be offered at $6.1m in a run of 50 at a rate of 15 per year.
That's $91.5m that people out there are willing to spend on RB17s over the course of a year.
The point is that there is serious cash floating around being spent on cars like this, so it's not like the money is the issue. It that, for people buying these cars, these crazy track-day specials are more desirable/valuable than anything that motorsport offers.
The question then is perhaps whether can that gap ever be closed or is it just the way things are now?