What is a "touring car?"

[Andy Bettencourt]

Not entirely. I think frontal area is a huge overlooked (maybe for good reason) advantage/disadvantage in IT. I see it in my car. CD sucks. But frontal area is small. It matters and probably would with an Elan, ESprit or NSX.

So how do you qualify that frontal area as an 'advantage'? If it's top speed vs other cars in ITS, how do you then separate frontal area from 'class leading torque'?

Just curious how anyone is mathematically coming to the conclusion that poor CD + small frontal area is...what?

As to the SCCA and classes, no doubt we don't want to add more. But the issue is to look beyond that hard stop and see where growth could happen while at the same time actually consolidating something. I would say, 'we have X classes today. If we were to clean sheet this we would go with the elimination of these 3 and the addition of these 2'...or something like that. Rip the bandaid off if you have to. I like that there is an effort not to expand, but you can still add classes without 'expanding', you just have to be willing to trim the dead branched to allow for new growth.

No ideas what classes those would be, just a conceptual example. Maybe all the classes are perfectly healthy. LOL

[JeffYoung]

Uh, my car doesn't have class leading torque, trust me.

The data I've seen of Miata v. RX7 v. Z car v. TR8 v. Mustang shows me that you either need slippery, or small frontal area. It IS an advantage over 100 mph, sometimes markedly so.

I fully agree with you it is hard to quantify this stuff, which is why we stayed away from it in IT.

However, if STL is looking for the difference between "sports car" and "nonsports car" then this is it. Everything else seems like a red herring to me (doors, engine orientation, etc.).