On the topic of competition and points etc.

I agree with Jason that there's more fun to be had in picking your target opposition regardless of class and run with that. I do remember the days of a certain HMCS Pontiac Bonneville chasing Toyota Echo on autoslalom courses. Completely different class, different points, but that was fun to watch.

So, in the same spirit, I know that my car is not necessarily a natural autoslalom championship car when pitted against other cars with similar prep levels.
I will never spend enough money on this car to try a run at FTD even if the driver happens to improve a bit.
But since I do want to change how the car drives on the street/track/autoslalom, I do plan certain modifications to make it more enjoyable for me. It will likely land me just inside a very competitive class where I won't have a chance to consistently win on merit. But the fun factor will still be there.
Yes, it's not much of a thrill to be an empty class champion.
Looking through the results, I just realized that I should've probably bumped to BSP for all events to have some more competitive fun. It would actually give me more overall points and surprisingly I ran close to Scott's times in a couple of events. Shooting for Ralph's times is probably too high, but Devon's quick FR-S may be a good benchmark!

Now, excuse me... I have to run to a meeting with my team's head of the Computational fluid dynamics department and ask him to prepare an analysis of how this proposal might affect the competitiveness of the wife-approved modification budget for next year.

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Moving backwards... FWD to RWD, that is.

HAHA... those were the days.......

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"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."-William Gibson
1989 Van Diemen - Formula 2000 Continental

I would agree with Scott, and I can see the benefit of going to PAX within certain class groups to determine the winners. If I/we were going to go for the win within a true PAX scoring system, we would be foolish to run the Mustang in SM. I would just get an FRS, good tires, light rims and a rear swaybar and stay in whatever stock class it would fall into....at least then we might have a chance.

Heaven knows it will be difficult (if even possible) to beat Joel in FSP using PAX within an SP/SM classing system....it is hard enough to beat him and others (for Trevor anyway, for me harder yet!) as it is on straight time, even with the $$$ I have and am still throwing (not investing for sure!) in the car.

It is nice to win, but for me it is mostly for the fun and camaraderie (although it is nice to beat Trevor and others sometimes.....). I also enjoy seeing newbies join and grow the sport, and changes like this would help in that regard.

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ASCC VP Membership
'01 DHG Mustang Bullitt #16
'22 Golf R

Is the mustang to far gone to run esp?

Yes Once we put the torque arm on and changed the suspension mounting points it put us in SM

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2001 Bullitt......Not Mine, I Just drive it
2012 ARMS Regional Autoslalom 1st Place Overall
2012 1st SM ARMS
2012 ASCC Autoslalom 1st Place Overall
2012 1st SM ASCC
2009 ARMS AutoSlalom Top Novice
2009 1st ESP

That's not really correct, the torque arm is allowed in SP and the mounting points are not changed. The only thing that puts us in SM by my reading of the rules is the changing of the rear end gears from stock....so if we wanted to put the stock 3:27 gears back in we could run ESP.

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ASCC VP Membership
'01 DHG Mustang Bullitt #16
'22 Golf R

Crap, can't believe I never caught that ratio requirement for SP before. This PAX proposal would save me lots of money

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'99 BMW M3 / "Elvic"

I love it
This is the kind of discussion that other regions have likely been having for ages - in places where classes are actually populated so people care about what class they're in.
Hopefully it doesn't result in challenges and disagreements

As I hear about more people being eligible for SP it makes me think that I'll be further than ever from winning anything meaningful
Back to shooting for raw ftd.

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Money ---> Heat and Noise

MMSC #12/ASP

Ok, did up ytd ASCC results using the method discussed in this thread. There are some issues where people ran more than one class/car this year. I didn't break them out into different classes. This means some people (Alan and George come to mind) may have higher scores here than they should. That's why I'm not the scorer. Also, it is a fair bit of work to calculate all the points.
See attached jpg.

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2009 Civic Hybrid. 1997 BMW 328iS
evanwritescars.com

I guess we all have to cross our fingers that scca puts civics in asp! On that note, anyone want to buy my bmw?

Edit: not saying that it's the civic making him fast because we all know it's joel's driving but seriously, I want to get the e36 bmw now.

I have one, only minor assembly required

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'99 BMW M3 / "Elvic"

I also think that the overall winner should be whomever has the most points in their group. What's that? I'm biased? I have no idea what you are talking about

This may all have to wait at least a year anyway, because the class changes for next year do not yet have PAX values, and it might take a year to get them all sorted out. I'm guessing HS will end up with something like 0.78m which would be amazing.

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2009 Civic Hybrid. 1997 BMW 328iS
evanwritescars.com

Based on your calculations, you have the most points of any group and would therefore be the overall winner

I could support having an overall winner via Prep-level points (more or less what you calculated), via straight PAX points or via straight FTD points (or any combination of the 3)

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Money ---> Heat and Noise

MMSC #12/ASP

Ah, you beat me to it Evan! I like playing with numbers, so I just put together a spreadsheet on this last night too.
I have each event in a separate tab with a breakdown by the new groups and sorted by PAX. I just needed to add the points and see if I end up with the same point results as you did once I do that.

Since the original intent was to increase group size to fuel some competition, here's how the competitor count would look for the proposed groups for each event in 2013 so far:


Scott's suggestion above to separate SP and SM groups seems to make sense as that is a large group and breaking it down would still leave sizeable SP and SM groups. Here's the above table with SP and SM separated:


I should also point out that in terms of competitiveness between SP and SM within the combined group would be 5 wins for SM and 3 wins for SP, so pretty balanced in that large mix.

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Moving backwards... FWD to RWD, that is.

Looking at those group #s, it occurs to me that if Stock classes are no longer permitted to use R-compounds in 2014+, it might be prudent to merge S and ST prep levels together?
That "17" is an obvious outlier, and the purpose of the idea is to have more than 3 competitors in a class at the majority of events

They would be quite similar to each other as regards to car capability and weather dependence

Is that rule-change confirmed by the SCCA yet?

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Money ---> Heat and Noise

MMSC #12/ASP

Actually, the way scott proposed it with sm being separate actually looks pretty fair for everybody. There seems to be a few people that aren't even fully prepped for street prepared but have one mod done that throws them into sm. With scotts suggestion, nobody would have to worry about being paxed against street prepared cars that are currently as fast or faster than they are now. Mind you, thinks could change over the course of a couple years.

Keep in mind that a number of SM competitors are actually SP cars that have bumped up. So the SM numbers might be skewed.

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1997 Talon TSi AWD
2008 EVO X MR

Yes, I realize that but it would create an open class. You might find some people running sm anyway just to compete against people they've been with for some time now. I just feel that it opens up a window for people who want to do things to their cars but not be fully prepped for sm and be paxed against street prepared times. Not everyone strictly uses their car for autocross. Whether they want to be faster for time attack, or enjoy their car as a beefed up daily driver. Alan/Trevor and Ben for example, have cars far from being sm but have to run it anyway because of different gearing and an engine. With sm combined with street prepared, they'd have to start stripping their cars and dumping thousands into parts so that .867 reflects their cars performance and could compete against someone like Joel in fsp with a pax of .838 on a, correct me if I'm wrong, fully prepped fsp car.

EDIT: Read through that pretty quick, didn't realize you were replying to Lucian's response. I'd also like to add that people have made the argument that those with a mod that places them in SM could always go back to stock. This is true but it could end up costing thousands to do. I think a lot of us just have enough money to afford tires and keep our cars running. However, I do see your point, Scott. Looking at the list, there's a few competitors in SM that could run SP and it could shrink the SM list down to a few cars and then we wind up right back where we're at with dead classes. Maybe we could do a poll and see who's willing to run in SM next year if anyone else is at all interested in trying it that way?

Good point. Like Evan said, our numbers do not reflect true vs bumped classes.

And it raises another question under this proposal: would folks be allowed to bump up if there's already a full group (not class)?

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Moving backwards... FWD to RWD, that is.

Is it just stock classes or is it stock and street touring classes that will be running street tires? If ST can still run R-comps then that is a good reason to keep them separate.

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2007 Volkswagon GTI
2002 Nissan Sentra SER spec-V
2010 Toyota Venza

AFAIK, ST classes have never allowed R-compounds

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Money ---> Heat and Noise

MMSC #12/ASP

No R's in ST currently....

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#20 Scion FR-S 6MT Powered by:
Great North Performance, Morine's Towing Performance & Off Road, Jani-King Canada and Blue Buzzard Performance Parts.

2013+14+15 Atlantic Sports Car Club Overall Autocross Champion
2013+14+15 Atlantic Region Motor Sports Overall Autocross Champion
2017-18 BAC Overall Rallycross Champion

ST stands for Street Tire, so no R-comps. Even though most R Comps are street legal, the treadwear rating is the deciding factor.

As a newbie, all I'll say is that the PAX makes me feel better about coming dead last on raw time!

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David Hewitt #63
ASCC Solo Director 2022

My count of SM cars that currently "have" to run SM/SSM:

Current:
Alan G
Trevor G
Mike S (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
Mike B
Ben B
Taylor M (assuming civic or M3)
Matt E (assuming civic or M3)

Next year additions:
Jon M
Scott M (50/50 chance...I want that steering rack)

If Alan decides to keep the bullitt SM I'd say you've got a pretty decent sized class there, I count 5 people that have attended almost every ASCC event, that is just as many as the stock or ST categories.

Obviously it wouldn't make sense for MMSC to split the classes, but I think there is a solid argument to split SP/SM classes on a regional/ASCC level. Of course attendance could completely change next year, but that is a possibility for anything. Last year there was no one in STX with me in ASCC.

Just for perspective, a SSM car would have to be an FSP car by 2.6 seconds on a 60 second course to win PAX. Or if you class SM/SSM seperately, the SSM car only needs a 0.86 second advantage over SM. There's also the SMF class that no one seems to use, even though there might be eligible cars in the region.

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'99 BMW M3 / "Elvic"

So has SCCA confirmed that there will be no more R-compounds in Stock classes? Or was that just talk?



EDIT- It looks like they're renaming it from "Stock" class to "Street" class, and it will be a less-modified version of "Street Touring"

That being the case, I think Street and Street Touring should be combined into one prep-level (using their appropriate individual PAX factors)

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Money ---> Heat and Noise

MMSC #12/ASP

From what I gather on Evan's last post, scca won't have the pax numbers calculated for stock classes running only street tires until after next season.

The Match Tour runs until late october so I don't think we'll know until after that. I assume they SEB has some sort of big annual meeting where they decide on this stuff?

I think there is a pretty good chance of it happening...the road tire class had 115 entries at nationals this year. For comparison, stock class had 195, street touring had close to 250. I'd say the interest in street tires is pretty good.

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'99 BMW M3 / "Elvic"

Read Fastrack for the months after the initial proposal and they have made quite a few changes from the original proposal. For example, they have removed allowance for both sway bars, they added and then removed camber plates, they also removed the current allowance for wiring changes for stereos (??). Every time I check I get excited, then disappointed the next month. No idea when the rules become final, but I did notice that the last month's update indicated they were now discussing 2015, not 2014.
Use this link, but change the month in the URL to be the month you want to read. It discusses all the proposal changes as well as everything they discuss, like car class changes.
http://scca.cdn.racersites.com/prod/ass ... l-solo.pdf

After all that, ST and Street seem to be close enough to me.
It's also not a matter of opting out of a trophy as someone suggested above. I want to be able to compete for one without having to taylor make modifications, or having to be limited in what car I buy (to make sure it can have a full/decent class.

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2009 Civic Hybrid. 1997 BMW 328iS
evanwritescars.com

The SCCA classing & prep changes are proposed by the SCCA Solo Events Board (working with Advisory Comittees for each class category), members provide feedback, and then the SEB submits the changes to the SCCA executive who (usually) approve.

Rick Ruth (not the SCCA) creates the PAX/RTP index http://www.autox4u.com/resources/pax-index-2/

There are enough "Road Tire" class entrants that Rick will likely have a PAX number ready when these SCCA class changes take effect.

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Charles