Time to stoke the fire again, I think.
I've been kind of sitting back and watching how the discussion goes, and
I've come to a couple of conclusions.
First one is kind of obvious--the ball belongs to someone else (the
organizing groups) and if I want to play, I've got play by their rules.
Everything else is kind of theoretical unless I decide I want to go to all
the pain and effort of getting my own ball.
But the arguments about WHY there are these rules rotate around two
ideas--(1) that it's got something to do with safety and insurance (which
MIGHT be true, but seems highly unlikely to anyone who's been on track in a
90 MPH car with a handful of 150 MPH cars behind them, or for that matter,
who pays the same entry fee, and therefore theoretically the same component
of insurance cost as say a McLaren with an amateur driver at the wheel. It's
highly unlikely that adding Fiberglas fenders to my TR3 would increase the
risk to anything comparable to bolting my fanny into a 500HP major league
car piloted by my minor league talents. In other words, I don't think much
of that argument (though for all I know, it might be true--as a small
business owner I know firsthand that insurance companies are very strange
beasts).
Or (B), that it's some kind of fairness issue. Once again I invoke those
much faster cars in our racing groups which none of us will ever catch even
if turbochargers were legal for us and us alone. The underlying tenet of
vintage racing is that it doesn't matter who is in first place because the
cars are not evenly matched and drivers are not supposed to race at
10/10ths.
I made the comment in my first note that rules are always political, by that
I meant they always have the interests of some particular group at heart.
While I think impassioned arguments about the sanctity of this or that are
surely interesting, it all really comes down to the same thing--them's the
rules. As fuzzy, variable, strange, or arbitrarily enforced as they might
be. When I started our I made the mistake of looking around and copying what
I saw instead of figuring out what the book said. So it goes.
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