A couple of points about SS/T:
It's the SS competitors, not the manufacturers, who didn't want to see SS rules merged with T (i.e., they don't want SSB/SSC to become T4/T5). That's because it'll raise costs -- whereas people must run stock shocks now, under the T rules, they would have to go out and buy expensive aftermarket shocks. So it was the members who put the kibosh on that idea.
What the manufacturers didn't like was the proposal that along with the abovementioned plan, SSB and T3 were to merge ... in other words, SSB cars would be slotted into T3, and SSC would be T4. The manufacturers wrote a letter to the CRB/BOD stating that they didn't want their SSB cars competiting with their T3 cars (i.e., SSB MX-5s competiting against T3 RX-8s, SSB Civic Sis competiting against T3 S2000s, etc.)
On the topic of progression from SS/T to IT, aged out cars, and cars too fast for ITR: it is getting cheaper and cheaper to campaign a 10-year-old C5 Corvette Z06. These are getting relatively inexpensive (not by SSC standards, for sure, but not bad compared with newish T3 cars), and are getting slowly less competitive, and aged out, of T1. While I agree that most of those drivers are likely to move on to bigger & badder T1 cars, there is about to be a glut of Z06 Corvettes in race trim on the market with nowhere to race them. Why *not* IT? In the larger sense of a club-wide classing
system, it's only appropriate that
all aged-out SS/T cars have an appropriate place to play in the same club, and I can't imagine why we IT people wouldn't want to welcome them with open arms.
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