Thanks Chris for the background. I totally understand the dilemma and I would be willing to provide any information that would be required.

Also, just a little more information, in the way of being fair, open and transparent to allow for a correct decision, there were only ever 2 Cougars built. The Capaldi's built the first one and then the Mumm's built the second one. The Mumm's made some improvements to the car based on what they saw from the Capaldi car so it is sorta a Second Gen car. The main issues with the car in WC was it constantly grenaded the gearbox on the standing starts and the cars spent most of every race running with a self destructing box so very rarely were the cars able to run "Flat Out" for the whole race. No standing starts in SCCA Club, far less of an issue. I have been told the Capaldi's were replacing boxes each session.

The second thing was that the cars are extremely nose heavy and as they were raced on non-R-Compound tires for the most part, they would chew up tires pretty quickly and the times would go off. That is why they were granted the ability to go up to a 245 section front tire. As the car can run on 245's now, that is not a major issue any longer, but the tires still go off at about 40 minutes.

I do have a very big safety issue with adding 388 lbs of bolted on ballast to the car. I also wanted the decisions to be made on actual information and not on how the car used to perform. In the cars present development level (2003 VTS plus 235x40x17 Toyo RA1's), it runs about 5 seconds a lap slower than the present WC GTS cars at Mosport. I don't know how that would fit into your target laptimes for the class.

Eric