"Burns, James B." <James.Burns@jhuapl.edu> wrote:
> It looks to me as if Street Mod has been fairly popular this year.
I'd have to agree. Attendance hasn't been the spectacularly overwhelming
wave I'd been hoping for, but it's been much better than I'd planned for. I
had expected it to take 2 years to get where it's at today.
There are little quirks and statistical anomalies though. Some regions are
reporting that SM is making up over 10% of their attendance. Others are
actively discouraging SM's whole existance, refusing to allow the class to
run as "SM" even when SM cars show up for the event.
The attitude of the local region has a HUGE impact on how well the class is
doing. Regions that are welcoming and accepting and who promote the class
get large turnouts. Regions that discourage the class (or who pretend it
doesn't exist) get poor turnouts. Suprise, suprise.
And then there's just plain ol' dumb chance. In Detroit Region, we've had
SM turnouts ranging from 6-18 cars, depending on what else is going on that
day, how well the event has been publicized, and what the weather looks
like that morning.
My take on it is that for regions that are positive in stance towards SM,
the class is doing as well or a little better as the other Stock/Street
Prepared classes. For a small handful of regions, the class is doing much
better than average.
Divisionally, (ie, series like the CENDIV series) the class is doing a
little worse than average, mostly because it takes time for regional
competitors to "trickle up" to Divisional events. There's also the
"problem" of too many events competing for (at the moment) too few
competitors. For the group of people who run SM Nationally, the Divisional
series' are kinda on the bottom of the totum pole - there's a huge push to
get good National attendance numbers, so if you're going to travel, you
might as well go to a National event, if there is one that weekend. If
there's a regional event, that takes precidence (help the newbies, set the
example, cultivate the crop of potential National newbies). Then, now that
you're running 3-4 events a month, you gotta squeeze maintainence in there
somewhere, and test weekends... - now if there's any money left, and you're
not completely burnt out, you can do a CENDIV....
Nationally, the class is doing MUCH better than expected. Attendance has
been growing steadily, with double-digit class sizes becoming more the norm
(The NWDIV championship is this weekend, there are 11 SM cars running)
There are 6 cars currently on the Nationals website running SM, and I know
of 7 more who have sent in entries. This makes it highly likely that SM
will have the 15 cars needed to get their own class. (Note that ESP is only
showing 11 cars right now, so all we're seeing is the tip of the iceburg)
> Has there been any talk of expanding
> SM in the near future to include a class for 2-seater cars (CRXes with
> Integra motors, forced induction Miatas, MR2 Turbos with boost
controllers,
> etc.)?
There has been LOTS of talk. The problem is, there's been lots of _talk_. I
get lots and lots of people telling me that they want "SM for 2 seaters",
but there hasn't been much of an effort to get them organized. Frankly, I'm
too busy with the runup to Nationals - I can barely keep up with "SM
Classic" business. People interested in this class should start organizing
themselves if they want it to happen.
Incidently, last year I thought that there would be a distinct
stratification of SM into "SM slow" and "SM fast", so that I would have to
ask the SEB to split "SM Classic" into ASM and BSM to keep the playing
field level. But now that the data is on the wall, there is no
justification for such a split - so I ain't gonna ask for it. We may have
to do it in 2001, or 2002, or whenever, but "we will create no new SM class
before its time".
DG
|