Apparently my reply to Paul Tibbals thoughtful message went solely to him; I
meant to send it to the whole ba (slightly edited).:
Now you have your proper introduction to SCCA. Kind of a joke. :)
Whenever one asks the members of a class if they would like to see a
specific change, and answer will be no; they prefer the status quo,
especially if you ask the class leaders.
I do believe the STi proposal was carefully thought out. We have
created/changed a previous local class, which was originally called
"Rookie," all in one group. At that time, never having run in a rookie
class,
I didn't see the need for such a class. Nevertheless, it happened. All in
one run group. You can imagine the havoc that wreaked when a group was run
by rookies who didn't know anything. :) Not a good scene, as well, it was
chaos.
Result, we broke it up into parallel classes. Even so, the participants
come and go with remarkable frequency, few sticking around long enough to
get points.
The same is true of the Sti class. Over the 7 Slush series events, only
16 ran 50% or more of the 7 events, and 6 earned trophies. However, the
total number of participants is 53. Maybe they didn't come back because they
figured doing well was impossible. Coming in 20th out of 20 is not a
friendly feeling.
OTH, with this new setup, a STi competitor has a better chance to doing
well on an event basis, and over a series.
And the run groups for the events will be more even in number.
Speaking of fairness (did we even mention that?), there's nothing fair
about being a small group working for a very large group. If it's hot,
rainy, or otherwise bad, it's even worse.
As a final note, I'd always rather be ranked in class by actual
competition, head to head, rather than by some numbers based on
variable factors. The indexed scores are intended merely as a way to tell
yourself, in a relative fashion, whether you're doing better or worse.
--Pat Kelly
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