Jeff Winchell wrote:
>
> >"Mark J. Andy" wrote:
> > ESP is supposed to be a pony car class.
>
> > "Loren Williams: wrote:
> >If it is not permissible for anything other than an American-made "pony
> >car" to win this class
>
> Your inference doesn't follow from Mark's statement.
Depends on how you read it, I suppose.
> It is possible for a class to be a ponycar class, and for non-ponycars to do
> well, and even from time to time win by a normal margin at the national
> level. The DSM's are an example of this in ESP. I have heard of no outcry to
> remove them from ESP.
If they'd left the turbo issue alone and a DSM actually won... oh yeah,
there would have been a big outcry.
> What Mark and others don't want is for non-ponycars to win by a LARGE margin
> at the national level, nor is it desired for non-ponycars to win MOST of the
> time (I hope this doesn't bother the DSM drivers).
Is 1.1 seconds overall really a large margin?
Last year, ESP was won by a GM "pony car"... by a factor of 1.2 seconds!
First in SS was also a 1.2 second margin.
First in AS had a 2.5 second victory!
This year, DSP was won by .998 seconds.
FSP by over 1 second.
EP by almost 1.2 seconds.
FP by 1 second.
ASP by 1.3 seconds.
Yeah, it's a good solid win for Tunnell, but such things are not unheard
of. Should we really be surprised to see a driver with multiple national
championships under his belt win another one?
> An example of measures
> taken in the past to keep this true is that the SCCA allowed 95 Cobra Rs to
> backdate/update with other 94+ Mustangs (to bring more competitive balance
> to ESP as the F-Bodies were winning too much vs the Mustangs and the
> Mustangs outsell F-Bodies by a large margin).
Another example was disallowing the update/backdate of turbochargers to
keep the DSM's down.
> At regional or local levels of course, all bets are off depending on what
> driver shows up.
Everything is different at the regional level, that is a given.
> Also, the main reason there is a ponycar class is the very large number of
> people who buy these cars and want to race them.
That's fine. All I'm saying is that any car that is in a class should have
the "right" to win. If the powers that be expect that not to happen, then
they must be only classing cars in that class that aren't capable of
beating the chosen overdog. That's not fair to the drivers of all of the
other cars in that class. If the M3 is reclassed, this just proves my
point.
> If someone wanted to start a class for DeLoreans, no matter how cool that
> person thought Deloreans were, there aren't enough similar people to justify
> such a class.
There is a class for DeLoreans. Chances are, if a DeLorean ever took the
BSP title away from a Corvette, it would soon be reclassed as well.
--
Loren Williams | Loren@kscable.com
'94 Saturn SC2 | Wichita Region SCCA - http://www2.southwind.net/~scca
|