Just a quick unofficial note about some of this:
It's funny, we had these same discussions back when we were excited that
team.net had reached 50 whole subscribers.
For the people advocating OEM parts - I suggest you look at the history of
Showroom Stock, and how it went from the budget concept to one of the more
expensive ways to race in SCCA. Unfortunately, if we did go to an OEM
rule, the result would be that people unwilling to cheat would be at a
disadvantage. The road racers, with very deep pockets as far as compliance
checking, were unable to police this sort of thing - there's no way we
would be any more successful with no budget. Wishing won't make it
so. This is the worst of all possible situations.
The most important part of this (IMO) is to keep costs down. Obviously,
5-way gozillion-dollar specials are not doing that. On the other hand,
requiring "OEM" units (which with enough money can be revalved to work
well) sounds good but it has been proven this is not a good solution -
ignoring the issues of revalvability/changing oil, what about manufacturing
tolerances? What about different OEM suppliers? Seems like this would
possibly accentuate even the differences between model years, where
different suppliers were used for different model years.
If you just say "any non-performance" replacement, where are you going to
get such a thing? I haven't looked lately, but if you look at any
replacement shock I've ever seen (even the $10 replacements at Pep Boys)
they make performance claims (bigger pistons, whatever). And don't a lot
of cars come with "performance" parts anyway? Defining "OEM equivalent" is
beyond anything I'd know how to do correctly.
At the moment, it is possible to get a large percentage of the advantage
for a reasonable amount of money - just get off-the-shelf Konis or
whatever. Yes, we can debate "reasonable" here, and it would be great if
this could be $0, but at the moment what we've got is the best we've been
able to come up with. Yes, we are working on wording, but I think we've
got the idea about where it needs to be. However, if anyone has something
better (in a rule form, not just a complaint or a wish), we'd be very happy
to hear it.
A similar set of arguments can be made about tires. Other than a spec
tire (which would be far more exclusive than any exclusion rule) what are
the alternatives? If ST takes off, we will have to do something more than
we what have. We know the TWI is wide open for abuse, and it's clear that
the tires currently considered to be the best under those rules are not
saving anyone any money.... OK, if we could come up with a workable rule
that would make the top Stock tires closer to "real street tires" I think
most of us would be a lot happier.
I don't know of anyone who would oppose improvements (mostly in costs) in
both of these areas. I am not convinced we can do a lot better than what
we've got. That doesn't mean I won't be happy to look at alternatives.
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