On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 07:13:11PM -0600, John Lieberman wrote:
> However, despite what the rules say, I'm also one of those diehards who
> believes that Stock SHOULD be just that - Stock - and not some
> multi-thousand dollar development project. Toward that end, I believe
> that Stock cars should have to run on street tires!!! Cat-back
Probably a mistake to jump in here, myself - I'm a relative
newbie to the sport.
Anyway, I've run in GS and AS for the past two years. I have had
exposure to several nationals competitors. On more than one
occasion, I have said "the rules should allow" x or y. The
response has always been that the spirit of stock is to prevent
changes that once allowed and performed by a single competitor,
all others must perform to be competitive. I didn't like that at
first, but my mind has been changed.
In my opinion, shocks are one of these items. In my opinion, so
are sticky tires.
Things are not that simple, unfortunately. The classing has been
designed to work around the allowable modifications. To suddenly
go back to OEM only, street tires only would throw in a huge monkey
wrench. As people have mentioned, 80's cars in stock classes would
be hard pressed to perform well where they are now because mostly
their shocks were not as good. And so on.
I don't think there's an easy solution. Everyone has wildly
different opinions on how to solve the problem. I think a goal
should be to keep competitor costs down and allow as broad a
spectrum of cars being used to compete in stock classes by the
rules to be truly competitive. Will all of them be? No. The
decision must be made based on some arbitrary but senseful limit.
Personally, I liked the suggestion of OEM or whatever single
adjustable aftermarket shock, but another similar idea that both
allows performance improvement for older vehicles and tunability
for the segment of the competitors adept at setup would work too.
I feel the decision should empower someone to show up with OEM
shocks and fair reasonably against those who have bought some
upgrade.
To sum up, shouldn't stock classes be about preventing any one
thing that someone modifies from forcing everyone else to do so
in order to remain competitive?
-matt
--
matthew c. mead
http://www.goof.com/~mmead/
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