Need help understanding VW classifications

[Knestis]

There's a lot of history here, Eddie and I'm going to be the very LAST in line to defend every decision that's been made since 1983. I wasn't on the ITAC during the Great Realignment but there are a couple of good reasons that the process wasn't applied to every car in the ITCS:

** Simply to save volunteer time, cars that were rarely raced were left alone - the assumption was that if anyone cared enough, they would request that these be revisited but that it didn't make sense to do it proactively. We have since had a couple of requests like this (e.g., most recently Pintos). You can - and SHOULD, I think - do the same.

** We have to recognize that there's such a thing as "close enough." It's frankly WAY optimistic to believe that we are within 10 pounds. I personally think that the wobbliness of most club racing drivers' abilities - even over the course of one on-track session - accounts for more variance in lap times than would even as much as 100# on something like a Golf. I'm SURE that levels of preparation account for way more than that. I grant that it would be symbolically valuable if we could be sure that the make/model of car was accounted for in a way that took it completely out of the picture as a variable in the equation that adds up to "competitiveness," but it's not realistic in the real world.

** People don't like change. If we did a stem-to-stern realignment, some drivers would be thrilled to get less weight while others would be unhappy because the same process netted them a heavier car. It's problematic for an organization like SCCA to change anything because members see the organization as set up to serve them - often individually.

** If one thinks about it, it's not surprising that the ITAC (and other committees), since they are made up of a cross section of member, vary as much as the entire membership in terms of how they think about things, their priorities, beliefs, experiences, etc. There are a couple of opportunities in the process for injecting "judgment" and not everyone does that the same way.(1) I personally think that repeatability and clarity trump the application of subjectivity but you need to recognize something that's very important - the ITAC members who support that aspect of the process do it because they think it gets the cars closer together in terms of competitiveness. There are plenty of examples in the ITCS where if the process were applied like a formula, member perceptions of inequity would go WAY up.

It would be a simple thing to have everything one way if instead of the ITAC and CRB, we had "Kirk." Screw you all, here's how it's going to be, so it's consistent and fair in my eyes.



I could bust my butt to use the process down to three decimal places and people would still be able to find fault if it didn't go their way.

Use the system to make incremental adjustments and we'll try our very best to be consistent. We've just initiated a process to record new classifications so we have a trail of crumbs back to our assumptions. Request that your car be re-examined and we'll see what happens.

K

EDIT (1) - Bill cited one - the "can it get there?" question. The other is the "IT power multiplier." In an effort to be more "fair," a different multiplier (other than the standard 1.25 factor) has been used. In some rare cases, "known IT power" has been used, where the ITAC thought that a sufficient body of evidence was available. Again, I'm not a fan of some of these practices but (again) again, it's a committee of racers who have different ways of doing what they believe to be the right thing.