Iain, as I'm sure you know, San Diego has some interesting ideosyncrasies to
it, with being on a hill, and the high speed on camber/off camber turns.
Gary has been running this lot for a long time, and a lot of the courses
there are similar.
You might also take a look at the '99 San Diego results in BS where Gary was
last year. George Doganis (also a San Diegan) won the class over Gary by
about 1/2 second, and then the next closest person was over 2 seconds back
(Alan Dahl.) There are other classes where competitive, but not nationally
top drivers have won their classes in San Diego also, which leads me to
believe that this lot has a much bigger home court advantage than most
others.
Now, my 2 cents on the S2000! As Gary has pointed out the S2000 is one of
the hardest cars I've found to drive at it's limits. The Boxster is
absolute heaven comparitively. That said, I think Gary and I have shown
that the car can compete well against the Boxster and other cars in AS. The
car has not been the huge overdog that some thought it might be. Granted
our cars aren't fully developed yet, but neither is the Boxster. Most of
the top Boxster drivers (not including GH) have basically just had their
cars aligned and slapped sticky tires on them. Of course the car is that
good from the factory, but with more work, I'm sure the car can be faster.
Locally in Seattle, we have Joe Goeke in a Boxster, Bill Buetow in a 944S2,
and myself in an S2000. At any given event, we are normally very close.
At the San Diego Tour this year, Gary had a bigger front bar on his car.
Although he still had problems with oversteer, he was able to put power
down, whereas I was getting inside rear wheelspin from lifting that corner.
With the acceleration areas those courses afforded, I'm sure this made a
huge difference. Now before you say "well that really makes my point that
the car should be moved," talk to some of the Boxster drivers. They are
having the same problem with not being able to put all of their power down
coming out of turns.
All said, I don't think any decisions should be made until people have had a
chance to attend Nationals this year. There should be a time limit put out
for letters after Nationals, like 3 weeks. I think it's too early to have
conclusive evidence on how these cars (all of the proposed classes) can
compete against each other until the best drivers from around the country
have a chance to run head to head.
Ron Bauer
S2000 driver that has driven all of the other competitive AS cars and can
see why they do so well!
-----Original Message-----
From: I.Mannix <mannix@privatei.com>
To: Steve Sucsy <ssucsy@nts-online.net>; Team.net <autox@autox.team.net>
Date: Friday, July 07, 2000 7:24 AM
Subject: Re: Classing by Potential/S2k
>At 8:31 AM -0500 7/7/00, Steve Sucsy wrote:
> At least at this
>>point, the Boxter and the 968 rule AS.
>
>
>http://www.scca.org/amateur/nat_tour/2000/sandiego/results.html
>
>Only one event, but I seem to remember Gary going prettydarnedquick in SD.
>Dunno what to make of it, but it seems like people are forgetting this
>event to me.
>
>
>Iain(and if he'd been clean, yikes?!)
>
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