...you just have to be willing to trim the dead branched to allow for new growth.
How do you reconcile the above with your earlier admonition that "outlawing cars" built for STL would be "ridiculous?"

EVERY class has a philosophy, Andy, and (not holding my breath) should the PTBs get it together and start paring classes for Majors, the distinctions among those philosophies are going to become extremely important. In the SCCA Club Racing paradigm, those distinctions are about mechanical attributes of the cars involved. The less homogenous any given class is, in terms of those attributes, the fewer are its distinctions from other classes. If Prod and ST have lots of commonalities, Greg's right that the argument for having both gets pretty thin.

The other option, a more inclusive (dare I say "progressive") approach, is to allow greater latitude in mechanical attributes in a class. That's not typically been the first principle for the Club, but we have been drifting that direction. If that's what we want to do, someone needs to make a strategic decision and really commit - like to indexed or "break-out" classes set by lap time rather than car design and improvements. I don't think the NASA PT experiment hasn't been a resounding endorsement for that kind of approach but if we're just going to look at "parity" at the RubOffs, then we're really doing it even if we don't fess up and admit it.

My argument has been, and continues to be, that STL is new enough that P. Keane's original vision for the class still has a lot of untapped potential, particularly in a mix with fewer classes, as long as it maintains what makes it different.

K