On Friday, September 20, 2002 5:15 PM -0500 Rocky Entriken
<rocky@tri.net> wrote:
> But what we are saying THIS year is that, for example, Scott McQueen
> winning a 17-car E Mod class is more deserving than James Gunn-Wilkinson
> winning a 23-car SM2 class (SM2 broke out from EM). My argument is they
> are equally deserving and should receive equal recognition.
While I'm tempted to agree with you on the surface of this argument,
there's another "real world" factor that intrudes:
People will bottomfeed when a "National Championship" is on the line - when
they get the jacket and their name in the book. They are much less likely
to do so when the prize on the line is a "National Winner" with no name in
the book.
I have seen this happen with my own eyes, the first time SM ran at
Nationals.
It was Sunday afternoon at the Pro, and a pair of *class deleted*
competitors who had just arrived were examining the SM results, and were
comparing them to their own results in *class deleted* Their conversation
went something like this:
"Dude, SM is like 2 seconds slower than *class deleted* and they run on the
same day as us! We should enter our *car deleted* in SM and pick up an easy
National Championship!"
"Nahh. SM isn't a real class yet. You don't get a jacket and your name
doesn't go in the book"
If we start assigning "real" Championships to supplimental classes, and
especially if we continue to have a pair of supp classes continuously on
deck like we have the last 3 years (and that it quite possible, as we may
have the data we need to justify/dispell the creation of SM3 "SM Heavy" by
the time STX/SM2 are finalized in 2005) then we will create a small
subclass of people who cherrypick this year's sup classes.
Why is this a problem? Because these people will artificially inflate the
class participation numbers early in the development of these new classes,
and will skew the data upon which the system depends.
As someone who has participated in the actual process of creating a sup
class and then nursing it to full National status, I think the current
process is GREAT, and should NOT be changed. As it sits, if you want to run
a sup class at Nationals, knowing full well that there's no jacket & title
waiting for you at the end, that means you WANT to run in that class based
on its merits and interest to you - and those are the people you want as
part of your core, and the people you want to count.
Creating and "blessing" a new class should be as painful and difficult a
process as it can possibly be, so that you can weed out the ideas that
sound good on paper but don't actually have a participant base. You want to
create classes where the people who will be running there want it so badly
that they are willing to fight and forgo a little glory for a while.
DG
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