What is a "touring car?"

[Chip42]

I admire the hell out of mazda for taking the initiative in creating an amazingly good, low cost RWD sportscar platform that to date has remained uncoppied to any real level of success by any other manufacturer, and to continue to make it in the face of declining sales. They built a car everyone thought would fail in the US market, proved them wrong, and hit the formula so precisely that no one who has tried has managed to get anywhere close to their level of success.

but it's not a touring car. it would be nice to have a touring car class, because there are so many good options, many pro series that could feed it, and I believe there's interest in it. if STL/U is too far gone, we should make a new one and consolidate the redundancy in the current mix of classes. the old days had sedan and production, and while entropy from those days certinaly led to the mess we are in now re: over abundance of classes, the groundwork laid then seems more appropriate to the realities on the ground today for reasons I do not think the folks at the time appreciated - namely those that Kirk elaborated on. ITB and C cannot be the last place small-discplacement, comnpromise-laiden boxes (AKA "touring cars" among other things) can race around in relative partiy without a miata or suchlike more purposefully built machine messing up the formula.