What is a "touring car?"

[JeffYoung]

I didn't say it wasn't common practice; I said it's an act of the demented.

Greg's picks are dominated by sports cars with the most powerful engine eligible. Why? Because people willing to spend coin to try to run up front understand that's the formula for success. Why would anyone do otherwise given the physics of the situation?

My proposition was that, particularly with the human beings we have at the levers of policy, a sports car is going to have an inherent advantage over a touring with the SAME engine.

K

But with all due respect, that's due to assumptions that CG is lower, that CD is lower, and that frontal area is smaller. That MAY be the case, or it may not. My gut non-scientific observation is that Miatas don't draft as well as Integras, and over 120 mphish (again, total observation bias here) the Integra has the advantage. But without numbers it is all guess work.

Which is the problem with trying to quantify difficult "effects" like aero, or torque, or "bad rear suspension" (as the owner of a live rear axle car, I frankly couldn't justify giving it a break against most stuff out there given what we can do with the rules in IT) -- it's just WAY above our skill level to do so in my opinion.

I would, however, really like to see numbers on aero, real CD x Frontal area numbers, of sedans/coupes v. sports cars. I'm sure some sports cars do quite well. I'm also pretty sure some coupes/sedans do as well.

Was at Homestead this weekend, was down there for work Friday and stayed and rented Mike VS's ITS Miata. Ran with the STL cars -- I think there were 5 dedicated STL cars. Two twin Celica GTSes, an Integra (Peter Keane?) and two Miatas. The Celicas were pretty. Peter's car is black and looks bad ass.