...was the 2205 weight for the early 1.6L miata the "right" weight? Was that change made because someone was winning a bunch of races?
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Neal, you're stepping into a pile of cow stuff that's been years in the making (VERY BIG GRIN!!!). I know you're "new", so here's a kinda-quickie explanation (a much longer one can be had be selecting "IT.COM Forums" at the top and start reading from the beginning...
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Once upon a time - circa 1983 - a few regions across the country started a class called Improved Touring. It became wildly popular, mostly because it gave a place to play for outdated Showroom Stock cars (back then we had four of them - SSGT, SSA, SSB, SSC). Several of these regions lobbied SCCA National (then in Englewood, CO) to recognize it as a class for National racing. Englewood refused, but compromised by publishing a standard set of rules for IT as a separate GCR book (back then the GCR and all the category specs were separate books).
However, Englewood added in there a couple of sticklers: first, IT was to forever be a Regional-Only class; second, so that they didn't have to put a lot of priority and time in it, they added the "no guarantee of competitiveness" clause. Bottom line: 'we're giving you some place to run these cars, but really nothing else.'
Well, no one really expected IT to grow as it has over the last 20+ years. It was, has, and probably will continue to be one of the most consistently-popular categories in SCCA history. During that time period cars were dropped into IT upon request, but the weights were never given much priority; it seems they were haphazardly slapped into a class and the weight was done by vote and/or "rule of thumb" (and some say with conflicts of interest, though that has never been proven).
This was the case up until about three years ago or so. Right about 2001-2003 time frame the participants within IT began a truly grassroots effort to put some type of reasonable system in place for approving, categorizing, and setting the weights for Improved Touring cars. Probably due to a major shift in management of SCCA, the Improved Touring Advisory Committee was formed (2004?) and requests for reclassification and weight setting were sent to these guys. They made their recommendations to the Competition Review Board, and the CRB made their suggestions to the BoD for approval.
Their first visible order of business was to get approved a systematic, somewhat-objective-and-formulaic weight-setting process that considered the physical characteristics of the car, such as drive layout, suspension/chassis design, and manufacturer's reported stock horsepower. This, they were able to get through the CRB and Bod. Once approved, the next move was to reclass obviously mis-classed cars out of ITS and into ITA, such as my Nissan NX2000 and a few other front-wheel-drive four-cylinder cars. These ITS-to-ITA cars were the first ones sent through this formulaic process.
Over the winter of 2005-6 the ITAC set upon grinding all the remaining prior-classed cars through this formulaic weight-setting process; the result was the list of cars with their weights re-set in the February 2006 Fastrack. NONE (zero, zilch, nada, zippo) of those changes were as a result of ANY race results. ZIPPO consideration for how they've done in the past. Every one of those changes was as a result of taking the existing fleet and running them through the new process. The fact that you may see some of the dominating cars getting weight added can be (and typically, is) viewed as evidence that the process wasn't right before. But, given it was rule-of-thumb and wink-wink before, that's not so surprising...
One other note of significance for the new ITAC process is that the ITS E36 BMW was judged to be so significantly out of proper weight-classing that it was given an intake restrictor instead of adding up to (or more than) 300 pounds of weight. The history of that car in ITS, along with the actions leading up to the intake restrictors, is a whole 'nother history lesson, and a painful one at that, best learned by reading through the forum. This, however, set the precedence for other cars in other classes to be possibly reigned in, should their performance potential be found to be significantly better than the formulaic process indicated (such as the ITA 1.8L Miata - bwah, hah, hah...couldn't resist...JUST KIDDING!!!).
The results are what you see today: reasonable classification of cars within each class of IT, and weights set with a mostly-objective process. As Jake pointed out, the fact that we can reasonably and diametrically disagree is probably evidence in and of itself the process is working...!
Phew! Back to work... - GA
. Because there was no documented method for setting weights prior to this new way, the ITAC wanted to 'reset' all the cars in the GCR via the process. This was don eso that we could move forward on a (theoretical) level playing field. Some gained weight, most lost weight. On-track results were not used AT ALL as a basis for the change - but in 99% of the cases, those results supported what was happening on paper.
