>The goal of stock class autocrossing
>should be to race your own everyday car with as little *additional*
>cost as possible -- not to convince you to sell your car and get a
>beater so you can afford to prep it to the limit of the rules.
No, but if you are crazy enough to even consider buying $5000 shocks to save
.2 seconds if that, then you are eventually going to find out that this
option makes more sense.
>Why? This is NOT how most people get into the sport. They don't say,
>"I think I'd like to get into autocrossing -- I'll go buy myself
>another car".
Again, once people start spending enormous amounts of time, effort and money
on the sport, they may find that this makes more sense than trying to
destroy their perfectly good street car. The only problem here is that
autoxing is so addictive, because it's so much fun! I mean, we all pay our
money and make our choices, and we are all free to leave and take up some
other pastime at any time, right? But can I really do that right now?
The thing is, Solo2 can be a weekend pastime that you do 3 or 4 times per
year, just to have fun and blow the carbon deposits out of the engine. It
can be sacrificing weekends with your loved ones to go after that regional
trophy that you just know would look nice on your bookshelf. And then I was
in San Diego this year at my first National Tour event, and I saw just the
most incredible moments of personal anguish and elation. Haven't even been
to Topeka yet. I think many people who get sucked into this sport will go
through more than one of these phases:
1) They think they'll never be the ones changing tires at each event and
twiddling with shocks
2) They are now 1) and are worried they aren't spending enough time with
their other friends on weekends
3) They don't *have* other friends anymore and need to go to events to
remain social
4) They are in the most competitive mindset they are capable of attaining
(whether that is regional points chase or 6 time national champ), and they
realize that they are spending so much time preparing the car, thinking
about autocrossing, reading team.net, that they might as well go that extra
mile to get the job done right.
5) They are realizing that either it isn't worth all the sacrifice, or they
have had enough of it, or they are just too physically tired/broke to
continue at this level. Time to throttle back.
6) They are back to running street tires.
Side note: Did you ever realize that they named the Evolution school phases
after the above? Really, it's just that after phase 3 you become an
instructor:)
I think the only rule you can change that will have a significant effect on
what people will be willing to spend/do to get to the top is to take away
the timers. The rules we have now are a decent compromise that lets
different people with different goals participate. I'd agree that minor
things could use updating (front swaybar only is really biased toward RWD
cars) but in the end you can take away as many external adjustments as you
want on shocks and somebody is going to have one set of shocks for each of
the 12 clicks of bump adjustment they used to have on a single set.
Peter
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