What is a "touring car?"

[Greg Amy]

Where to go from here? I see this situation/problem as two-fold: perception and reality.

First, perception. To Andy's question, if I were a new STL candidate with a Nissan Sentra (or even a Honda Integra) and interested in the prep level offered by STL, I would most certainly pause before entering into the existing STL field.

Whether deserved or not, Spec Miatas have a reputation of being aggressive drivers, and many people do not like racing with them.

Exacerbating that is the fact that the level of prep, and the level of driving skill, of Majors-quality Spec Miata has gotten so good that the difference between the "real" STL cars and front-end Spec Miatas are not really that massively different. I have been shocked at how relatively competitive the pointy-end Spec Miatas are with my 60-more-hp Integra...it doesn't help that an STL-compliant Spec Miata is now ~250# lighter than the comparable STL-spec Miata, and is not - and will not be - subject to any of the RWD adder changes going forward...and SMs continue to get faster.

Bottom line, the performance potential between SM and STL is too small. That potential difference needs to be large enough to attract mid-pack "true" STL entries while creating disincentives for mid-pack Spec Miatas. It is not. So you have a guy in a Nissan Sentra who's interested in STL, but realizes that unless he's got a 100% build car and drives the damn thing 100%, he's going to be mired in a large field of aggressive Majors-quality Spec Miatas. That's not going to be fun.

What could we do to resolve this? Well, it's unrealistic to try and slow down the Spec Miatas when they're competing in STL: it's impractical to add weight or a restrictor to them, or for that matter change any of their equipment. That leaves us with two choices: remove the explicit SM allowance (which I suggest should be a long term goal), forcing them to prepare to the same standards as everyone else; or we find a way to make STL as a whole faster. Neither of these is an attractive short-term solution, the former for its effects on participation numbers and the latter for increased costs for everyone else, just to address a "too fast" included category.

So we kinda stuck ourselves in a tight situation between a rock and a hard place with no reasonable, practical answers, a situation that is only going to get worse as time goes along. We're in a self-perpetuating circle: SM'rs are getting faster and participating in STL in greater numbers and causing a perception problem for those interested in STL, but we can't remove the SM'rs because they're the bulk of the class.

Simply put, while Spec Miata was the lift that the class needed to become a Majors class (ironically) Spec Miata may also be the cause of its ultimate death...

Then there's reality. If we ignore the above issue of perception, and we take the Spec Miatas out of our consideration for equitably classifying "real" STL cars, we're back to the whole idea of how to make econoboxes - ricer cars - competitive against sports/GT cars. We've been trying to do this via the RWD adder/crowbar, but that has been ineffective. We started with 2.5% (I believe?), went to 3.5%, now we're at 5.5% all with the goal of trying to, basically, make FWD cars competitive with the Miata (and with the limited exception of one FWD outliers that happens to have a buttload of power/torque, there are no FWD cars competitive with the Miata). Problem is, the Miata is so gawd-awful-dammed good that added weight doesn't really seem to be working as a deterrent, and it's killing it for other RWD cars.

Kirk's position is that we're attacking the wrong characteristic; he's basically saying that it's not just the RWD piece of it that hurts, it's the overall characteristics of a sports car that hurts, things like overall size, windshield, frontal area, weight placement and balance, suspension design.

So while I seriously doubt we're going to de-classify sports cars in STL, I do see the opportunity for having some type of adder to accommodate those sports/GT car characteristics, and adjusting the RWD adder appropriately. We've got two letters in our STAC queue for this discussion, and it's something we'll give serious consideration to for 2015 (we're pretty much "done" with changes for 2014).

We haven't heard a lot about this, but next year's big fracas is going to be engines; we're going to America's Dyno in 2015 for the Runoffs. I predict this time next year we won't care too much about things like sports cars and RWD adders... But if we get the chassis right this year and the engines right next year, then it'll all come home to one big Kumbaya session at Mid-Ohio in 2016...

We'll see how things go.

GA