It's looking like for '07 the MARRS race groups will been revised and ITA will be running with ITS/ITR (in '06 we were with ITB/IT7). ITB/ITC will now be together, and IT7 will race with SRX7/SSB/SSC. It concerns me that if some well built ITR cars show up we my be facing a situation where the great majority of the ITA cars (who typically outnumber ITS cars by more than 2X), possibly even those racing for a podium spot, will be in danger of getting lapped by the front of the ITR field. I know how the MARRS ITA drivers feel about this, but was just wondering what those of you outside the region, especially those who were involved with the ITR initiative, feel about this grouping. Keep in mind that at Summit Point a lap time differential of somewhere between 5 and 6 seconds should be the point at which IT cars will be getting lapped.

On another note, it looks like (keep in mind nothing is 100% right now, as I understand it) they have also come up with a novel idea for dealing with the undersubscribed groups. For those who hadn&#39;t heard, there was a big debate about how to deal with the large disparity in group size (<10 for some groups v. almost 50 in others); the original solution was to make the MARRS races restricted, with the faster open-wheeled cars (wings-n-things) being excluded. Apparently the region&#39;s board didn&#39;t care much for that solution (along with many of the members as I understand - including yours truly), and asked the comp committee to come up with something better. So the decision has been made to add another run group (going from 9 to 10) for &#39;07, but also to go with the caveat that any group with less than 16 cars qualifying will have their races shortened to a number of laps equal to the number of qualifiers. My first reaction to that was "what a great idea", but after some thought I can&#39;t help but wonder if this won&#39;t have the effect of eventually eliminating some classes (how long are the FV drivers going to be willing to pay $200 for a 7 - 8 lap race?). Just wondering if this has been tried in any other regions, and what you guys think of the idea.