March FasTrack is up

[Andy Bettencourt]

Fair questions. And tough ones as we all know. I think many of them have been discussed in one form or another on this forum at length. I'll see if I can find the time to contemplate them in more detail and write something up. If nothing else, I think your questions illustrate why I think using real world numbers is a tricky proposition and having some form of proactive evaluation process would be good.

I would ask how was it determined that the cars I mentioned previously, the CRX, Integra, and 240SX, needed to have their weight adjusted? I'm not talking from their previous, before-process weight, but from the standard process weight. It would seem that most of the questions you asked above would have had to have been answered in some fashion in order for their weights to be adjusted using something other than the 25% standard.


David

I think we can agree the questions are tricky. I believe most people don't consider how in depth the thought process has to be in order to implement strategic thinking like your idea. At some point, it is too complex given the expectations of competitiveness we have in IT.

We applied the process in broad fashion to every car in IT over the winter of 05. We also applied what we knew to the cars we knew it. There were cars that lost weight and cars that gained weight. They didn't gain weight based on their 'dominance' on-track, but since I believe the process to be fairly accurate, it wasn't a coincidence that the 'cars to have' were light by over 100lbs and the cars that were also-rans were heavy by over 100lbs. ANY car that was outside that 100lbs had it's weight reset - up or down. Interesting, the 12A RX-7 gains over 50% in IT trim...it was applied as such and it STILL lost weight. It wasn't about slowing cars or speeding cars up, it was about getting as many legacy cars as we could through the same system we were using to class new cars per member requests - so we could go forward signing the same song.

I understand people are cautious about the ITAC using 'what they know' when classing - but I am a firm believer in these things:

- There is no way we can re-evaluate cars every few years - the data just isn't out there - and the questions I posed to you were meant to illustrate how hard that would be
- It isn't perfect, but it is a heck of a lot better than using a standard amount for everyone. Each class would have it's HUGE overdog
- We DO have a method to re-evaluate and correct a car that is horribly misclassed and is ruining class equity. There just has to be the data to make a move. We haven't had a car yet that we have had to invoke a PCA on 'post-process'. I don't see any right now on the horizon either. Each class seems to have a multitude of choices that can be WINNERS any given weekend.

I can't say this enough - it's an imperfect process in which we try and get better and better with - but it will never be as 'good' as some people want...and that is a good thing IMHO - because THAT is year to year comp adjustments based on on-track performance and that AIN'T GOOD in my eyes.