Although I have kept quiet through 12 (really 12 pages?) of this. You can certainly add me to the list of Shelby owners that was impacted by the change. Having gone through a couple of years of informal discussions on the car and seen the effects of the original great re-alignment with no change to car, I also purchase ~$1100 worth of wheels in February/March of 2007. Additionally, about a month before the Shelby reclassification was announced I committed to a different car having decided I was no longer gaining anything from running a car that would never be competitive. So in some ways I was doubly hit by the reclassification. The only saving grace was the wheels work equally well on my new weapon of choice.

However, no matter how much I may dislike the timeline and effect of reclassing this particular car, I still don't see that as the right argument for doing away with the 6" ITB/ITC rule. These types of effects are limited and it's obvious that the greater benefit is in the status quo. Just don't tell me (or anyone else in this situation) that they should be happy they wasted that money and development time. Commiserate with me, agree that it's tough, suggest that long term there is a bright side, whatever. But no one is going to be happy their car is now illegal and they have to spend money just to get back on track.

Now, I do think it's worth looking at the long term issues and seeing if there is a genuine need to reassess the wheel width rule. And I say that only because there appears to be quite a bit of differing opinion on the effects of wheel width on this particular category.

Obviously in an open ruleset, wider is better. With our limitations? Maybe the effect is minimal or it even damps out some of the other non-linear effects of weight. For instance, we have been debating if adders for different factors apply differently to heavy cars vs light cars. That may change if each car was able to run a similar weight vs tread width value. Obviously that's a complex problem to analyze and 12 more pages aren't going to resolve it but should is the wheel width limitation worth reviewing? Maybe?