In any event, I believe that while the concept of qualifying/non-qualifying races has merit, the National/Regional division serves the club better. With two distinct levels of competition, those drivers who are looking to start a career in racing have a better chance of being recognized. Kind of like the major and minor leagues in other sports.


Bill,

That's where the flaw in the logic is, the Regional / National distinction does not mean that their are two distinct levels of competition. Especially not when you have one very popular category that only gets to play in one arena.

If anything, I feel that making all categories National (or better yet, just have Club Racing categories that have a rules section (Competition Specifications) in the GCR. All such cars are eligible to compete in National Championship qualifying races. Other, more localized categories (e.g. ITE, SRX7, RS, etc.) would be allowed to compete in the non-qualifying races in the Regions / Divisions that recognized those categories.

With some of the quality drivers/cars out there in IT today, you can't say that Regional racing is a lower level of competition than National racing. That would be like saying that you're not at the top of the heap unless you drive one of the fastest types of cars (e.g. GT-1, FA, CSR, etc.).

As far as the argument that IT cars should just be allowed to run as Prod cars, at Nationals, how does that benefit anyone? If anything, it's a poor attempt at a cheap fix for an arbitrarry problem. Prod cars are Prod cars and IT cars are IT cars. They have different levels of prep, why would you expect them to compete against each other? Now, I know someone will say that you already have that in Prod vis-a-vis full-prep vs. limited-prep. But a full-prep Prod car is closer to a limited-prep Prod car than an IT car is to a limited-prep Prod car. Not to mention, that I think you stand a better chance of doing away w/ the Regional / National distinction than getting IT cars to run as Prod cars w/o any changes.

IT pays a big portion of the freight for Club Racing, it's time that it was given the same status as the rest of the categories in the GCR. Not to mention that I'm sure you would see 40+ car fields in ITS / ITA, and probably 30+ (maybe 40+) car fields in ITB / ITC, if they were at the Runoffs. BTW, how big were the IT fields at the '04 ARRC?

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