Mark Andy wrote:
<quoting Roger>
>> Somewhere, at this very moment, one of them is putting the
>> Pinto on the exclusion list.
>
>Where it should be.
Hahahaha. Yeah, SM should be very afraid of Pintos. Uhhh, lessee
here, they're, ahh, rare. Yeah, that's it. Ford only made, what
3 or 4 million of them, right? And, uhh, oh yeah, they have too
much "road-hugging weight," according to Ford. And they're too,
hmmm, expensive. And you can't find parts for them. And, and,
....
>My idea of SM's demographic doesn't include ancient cars that
you have to
>be 50+ to have ever seen new.
You'd better be careful about such pronouncements. Cars that
currently fall within your "idea of SM's demographic" have this
funny habit of getting a year older each year. Whatever your
cutoff year for exclusion, by definition there will be some cars
that are just inside your envisioned group of allowed cars. Each
year your exclusion list will grow.
If your "target demographic" is who I think it is, I'd wager that
most of them aren't buying this year's model and doing all those
SM kinds of mods. They're typically starting with cars that are
already 5-10 years on the way towards your proposed obsolescence.
After a car has been fully prepped for SM, it won't be of much
use for anything else. Who's gonna want to see their investment -
in time, money, and sweat - instantly obsoleted just because of
some arbitrary cutoff? If it's really true that "modern
technology" gives newer cars a built-in advantage, then the folks
who compete in newer cars have nothing to fear from older ones
remaining in their class.
Roger makes a very good point in his post: a good driver in an
SP-prepped car with a puny NA four-banger and primitive rear
suspension pretty well stomped the local SM class. It's not the
car that's the overdog in this case. If any of the other
competitors had really maxed out their cars for SM and were
driving well, Roger wouldn't have been able to get very close to
them in an FSP Pinto.
If you set out to find a working definition of a bunch of babies
and whiners, I'd have to say that a group who decides that a
Pinto gives its driver an unfair advantage would be an excellent
one.
Jay
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