Replying to Rocky's post:
>You ask how many would show up if they knew a class wasn't a "Championship"
class?
>1. As many as have shown up for Supplemental classes over the years -- most
times sufficiently enough to make it a championship class (and often in
>greater numbers than existing championship classes sometimes for several
years (see F Mod) before the SEB finally relented and let their winners have a
>jacket.
Supplemental classes are the "up and comers," which seems like an easier sell
than trying to revive a dying class. What I'd like to do is turn things
around and not have the dying classes dying. What Clemens did in BM is
inspirational, and should be an example of why these existing classes are
entirely approachable by the rest of the world who might think otherwise.
Clemens, an article written for Sports Car about how you did what you did (and
I'm not talking about specifics like air pressures, alignment settings, and
shocks, just things like how you chose the class and car, how you went about
setting it up, and why you think you were successful) might go an awfully long
ways towards convincing those afraid to make such a foray into the
"builder/tuner" classes that such a foray isn't quite so crazy as we might
have thought. When Mark Daddio plays for a year in CM and wins, that doesn't
really give the rest of us mortals a lot of hope; he gave SM a scare with a
FWD Neon. When someone who graduated from E Stock without ever threatening to
win does something similar, that's different, and I'm interested in hearing
the story.
>3. And such a situation is likely to develop what you call "cheerleaders" who
work to whip up the competition to get there. Yes, CP has Grayden Obenour, >GP
now seems to be doing it with Bill Cutrer. SM had Dennis Grant in its
Supplemental years. Now Clemens is beginning to do it with BM. I like the
>cheerleaders, but I like it better when they do it to achieve something
outrageous (CP wanted to set a one-class entry record, and eventually they
did) than >be forced to just try to survive.
So doing something outrageous is more important than class survival? Not in
my world...
>I find it hard to say "if nobody shows up it's not much of a class" when
"nobody" is defined as SIXTEEN cars. My suggestion for defining a champion is
>SEVEN cars. Why seven? Because that's a 3-trophy, full-podium class. And if
somehow that definition of champion ended up with a different magic number
>than my proposed seven, I still would not care that much -- as long as a
class itself is not threatened.
No, I didn't define nobody as being sixteen. I just noticed that you seem to
want to keep a class alive even if it reaches zero, which I suspect you would
agree with as being a reasonable definition of "nobody?" You also lamented
that there's nowhere for a race prepared Corvette to play. Seems to me that
the Whitney/Brude Corvette has been having plenty of success of late, when
they can stay off the cones. Watching that car, I have often wondered about
the legality of building a V-6 Corvette in the class. Lighter weight and less
power might just be a killer combination there :-)
Another issue not addressed is that by replacing a class but keeping the name,
your solutions do nothing to help the cars that used to populate the class (as
in Mr Thatcher's complaint). I would tend to repeat my earlier assertion that
if the cars quit showing up immediately, then they don't really deserve a
class. For cars that require development, if you can demonstrate that you
have the interest and cannot be competitive, you might very well get relief.
If you just quit showing up, you demonstrate that you really didn't care that
much in the first place. I do have some sympathy - my situations have all
been in Stock, which despite having less development time, still has a
considerable investment in hardware. My Conquest was moved to B Stock from GA
Stock in 1993 (the MR2 turbo class at the time; MR2 turbos are still pretty
competitive in BS, but the Conquest is now back in GS where I think it's
really not competitive now). I had an MX-6 when the Type-R was put in GS.
The Type-R is now the car for DS, and the MX-6 is another uncompetitive GS
car. I had an MR2 turbo when the S2000 was put in AS. The S2000 is still one
of the contenders in AS, and the MR2 is now in BS, and not the car of choice
there. Not really a different situation to owning a Corvette when the rally
cars were put in ESP, then BSP. At some point, it seems to make sense to give
the rally cars their own SP class. But if that leaves a complete vacuum in
BSP, then why not skip a step and just say that BSP is the rally car class
because there just aren't BSP Corvettes left in the world? What I see is a lot
of giving up even before it has been demonstrated that there's a problem.
Hard to argue that you deserve a class to be competitive in when you do
that...
_______________________________________________
Support Team.Net http://www.team.net/donate.html
Autox mailing list
http://autox.team.net/mailman/listinfo/autox
http://www.team.net/archive
|