This is an interesting phenomenon, and I agree with it -- the idea that SCCA is a natural progression from autox to regional to national.

In my view, it's archaic and mostly gone. When I started IT racing in 2004, I'd done a few BMW track days but no autox. I picked IT because, well, I could race a TR8 and becuase I liked the ruleset. Simple. Easy to do. I bought my car for $7k as a street car and got it on track for another $5k. More than most, but not terrible with most of the cost of the car being initial purchase of a fairly rare automobile.

I quickly learned that IT fields were large, fast, and had a ton of talent. Way more than the National weekends I flagged at. Sure, one or two of the National gusy, like Greg Ira in his EP 240, were obviously very, very fast.

But so too was ITS -- the talent level there was astounding. James Clay and Seth Thomas. David Haskell and Sylvain Tremblay. John Williams and Chet Whittel. Basically, a bunch of guys who either went on to pro racing or could have.

While ITS has seen a participation drop (admittedly talent level, although there are still some really FAST guys out there), we still have a great core group that I'd put up against a "National" field at any time really. And ITA and B right now have a bunch of great cars and drivers.

What's interesting to me is that of the IT guys who DID go race prod, they went regional prod and did so not to "move up" but because they wanted to do more to their cars.

About the only "ladder guy" I know right now is Ruck in what, FP? And he won the Boreoffs in his first or second year there after years in IT.



Quote Originally Posted by Andy Bettencourt View Post
Greg slipped this one in close to year end. Getting my vote for best of the year. Read it as truth.