I say a car is a replica if it wasn't built in the period. I say
a replica should not be allowed to run with genuine vintage cars
UNLESS there are no surviving examples of the type. The Alfa
Bimotore is one example. The Ferrari F1 Sharknose is another.
There is a place for recreations of truly historic cars that have
vanished. If somebody wants to get a 427 SC Cobra replica and
race it against the real thing, I think they have their eyes set
on the wrong goal. They should either race a contemporary car
with other contemporary cars, or they should reset their own
expectations of vintage racing and settle for a genuine GT350,
which would cost them a lot less than a genuine 427 SC.
I'm somewhat ambivalent about making cars something they never
were. Sure, there's plenty of opportunity to take a mass produced
sports car that never raced and prep it for racing, but taking a
run-of-the-mill period Camaro or Dart and turning it into a faux
Trans-Am car? Maybe if you want to recreate a decent TA grid, but
is it historic? If you've billed the event as having a historic
Trans-Am race, the grid should be authentic, IMO. If your race
group normally throws all the big-block cars together, then it
doesn't really matter what livery the car is presented in. Like I
said, I'm ambivalent on this one. Preparing a period-correct car
to some set of rules that applied to that car at some point may
be valid, but it means you have to race against cars prepared to
that same set of rules, and possibly a faster group of cars. I
don't agree with mixing and matching rules just to go faster than
cars that would have been driven to the event way back when.
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