Originally Posted by Scott Giles, from roadraceautox.com
I hesitate to do this, because some people have comprehension issues and make things even worse. But since there is already wailing and gnashing and gross misinformation flying all over the interwebz (imagine that), I'll attempt to make it as plain and simple as humanly possible.
If I get something wrong, Members of the ITAC please sort it for me.
What we planned to do...
As many of you know, the ITAC has worked for a looong time to nail down a consistent and repeatable formula that can be used across the category. The goal has never been "perfection," but rather consistency. We know we can't class so many cars across so many classes perfectly, but we felt doing them ALL using the same process would at least gain us fairness and consistency. Plus we had the clause that allowed us to fix anything we got grossly wrong after a couple of seasons.
The intent was to get the process "nailed down and recorded" and then process every car requested by the membership using this approach. So far this has been done in sort of a "trickle" way, classing cars we had information on and tabling what required more data or those that fell under sections of the process that weren't yet nailed down (like torque).
What Changed Monday Night...
We will not be allowed to use the process on every car in IT. What we WILL be allowed to process are cars that are...
- New classifications.
- Deemed to have been classed in error.
- Are felt to be gross underdogs or overdogs. Yes, this is subjectively based on on track performance.
So, the big change is that we will NOT be processing every car. If the committee agrees that your car is reasonably competitive where it currently stands, then you'll get a "Car is correct as classed. Thank you for your letter" regardless of what the process says it should be.
This obviously includes subjective measures based on how a car currently performs. Something not included in the ITACs original plan.
What is currently NOT on the agenda, and not expected to be, is weight adjustments based SOLELY on performance. In other words "Jeff just killed everyone at the ARRC, put 100Lbs on the Civic DX" is NOT in the plans.
What could happen is "Jeff just killed everyone at the ARRC, lets look at the numbers." If the numbers look proper, nothing would happen. If the numbers looked suspect, we'd go searching for data.
Thats the way things stand as of today. Not what we intended, but you can't always get what you want.
Remember that the "A" in ITAC stands for "Advisory." We do just that. We advise. In this case the CRB decided that it was not comfortable with our ideas for a variety of reasons and effectively veto'd it.
And that was that.
There you have it. Please read this post at least 3 times and let it sink in before firing off an uninformed response or worse yet going and yelling that the sky is falling elsewhere.
IT is pretty healthy exactly as it sits, and at worst will stay exactly as is.