Howdy,
On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Justin Hughes wrote:
> The "racing is an expensive sport" argument has already been made. I'm not
> going to argue that point, because it's correct. However, the MC system
> lets someone make next to no initial investment in the sport to give it a
> try. If they find themselves doing well and get hooked, at that point they
> can and probably would spend the money to soup up their cars. Unless, of
> course, they enjoy the challenge of driving a slow car fast. :)
Uh, they can do that now. I did it last year.
Lesse, I went to my first autox with my new, bonestock, neon. I wouldn't
have been competitive in DS if I'd been allowed to have a AM car. But I
didn't expect to be competitive and had fun.
I decided I'd be interested in doing this more and wanted a competitve
car. I bought:
Wheels & Tires: ~$900
Harness: ~$150
Borla Exhaust: ~$200??
And I did an alignment. My car was now able to turn times that matched
the winning DS drivers times. Proven by having said winning DS driver
take a fun run in my car and come within .2 of his times. The Borla
exhaust wasn't really required and didn't do much if anything for
performance. You could say the same about the harness to some extent, but
it definately helped me drive.
Now, with the points system (or street tire system) lets look at the
costs:
Wheels & Tires: same $300 for wheels, plus $xxx for tires, after research
into what tires to buy. Eagle NCT-II's or Eagle RSA's (stock tires on
neons) wouldn't have been the tires no matter what. Even at $50/each, we
still total out to $500. Given the amount of wear my street tires took at
one event, I wasn't willing to run my daily driver tires autoxing, 'cause
it would destroy 'em and I actually care how the car goes in rain & snow.
Harness: Didn't see a point value. $150
Borla: Don't remember a cat back point value, but it doesn't matter,
'cause it doens't help.
So the grand savings for me as a newcomer would probably be $400 max.
$400 isn't worth re-writing the rules for to me.
Not that the points system doesn't have some good things about it, but I
do think its more feasible to fix the problems with our existing classing
system rather than create a new one. One fix that would go a very long
way towards that would be to have a specific allowance list for specific
cars. Let neons change motor moutns. Let Porche's change chain
tensioners, let mustangs have SFC's in SP, etc. Everyone seemingly hates
that idea because of some slippery slope somewhere. I guess if we allow
neons to use different motormounts, all the vette drivers have to go buy
new motors or something... :-)
Mark
|