OK, OK, GH and Roger Johnson shamed me into it so I went to work to put
the classes together sequentially.
I looked at the classes we have already and saw there is very much wisdom
in what the SEB has been doing over the years. This happened to make my
job a lot easier. Now, GH and Roger both misunderstood my proposal to
have classes that go from fastest to slowest. They both supposed that my
goal was to make lesser competitive cars find a competitive place to
play. Whereas this would be nice it would be a MAMMOTH task that one
person could never accomplish successfully. Starting with this list the
SEB could make adjustments in the future that would move cars up or down
the ladder depending on competitiveness.
What I did was simply rank all the Stock and Street Prepared classes by
PAX factor which looked like this when done:
Class Factor Difference
ASP 0.852
BSP 0.847 0.005
CSP 0.844 0.002
SS 0.830 0.014
ESP 0.822 0.008
DSP 0.819 0.003
FSP 0.817 0.002
AS 0.815 0.002
BS 0.812 0.003
STR 0.810 0.002
FS 0.807 0.003
CS 0.804 0.003
DS 0.799 0.005
GS 0.789 0.010
ES 0.786 0.003
STS 0.783 0.003
HS 0.781 0.002
I plugged the "Difference" column in there to dilineate the relative
difference between the class above and the designated class. You will
notice that the maximum distances between classes were .014 (between SS
and ESP) and .010 (between DS and GS). Most classes are separated by
.002 to .005.
Remember, in order for cars to be able to be classed together like this
the category preparation rules must still apply. For example Stock cars
follow stock rules, Street Touring and Street Prepared must follow their
rules. In my example, only 2 classes have two different prep arrangements
in them. If we added 2 more classes everyone would be in their own
preparation class. Certainly doable and STILL would nearly cut the number
of classes in half by combining the ladies into the open classes (see
more below).
Wanting to keep the number of classes down, I combined BS and STR into
one class and HS STS into another. Then I added another class to the
bottom for the last class to have a place for their ladies to run.
Why did I do that? Because instead of having separate Ladies classes I'm
proposing to have ladies (if they want a handicap) to run in the next
class lower. This would eliminate a bunch of undersubscribed classes both
locally and nationally.
So here's my sequential class list compared to the current class
structure. 16 classes versus 34 for the current setup (counting ladies
classes)
Now Sequential Ladies
ASP A
BSP B AL
CSP C BL
SS D CL
ESP E DL
DSP F EL
FSP G FL
AS H GL
BS-STR I HL
FS J IL
CS K JL
DS L KL
GS M LL
ES N ML
STS-HS O NL
P OL
OK, Blaze away!!
Ben
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