DFL is certainly a relative term - we have cars that are well prepared and driven "gently" by drivers whose talent isn't at "the next level". Having a tiny bit of experience, I feel that I'm wringing out at least 90% (or more) out of my antique POS and yet the car keeps moving backwards in comparison. The "fast" ITA cars are in the 1.26 and 1.27s while the old VW is turning 1:30s on a good day (with a tailwind). Hence the comments that the car is no longer competitive. Heck, I'd be ecstatic to just break into the 1:29s but that probably won't happen in my lifetime or without a JATO.
Let me clarify further that a new car isn't necessary EVERY year but part of this is just the nature of the beast - as newer cars are classified, the older cars fall further down the food chain. At some point, the question must be asked whether it's better to spend $20K to fully prep an ITA CRX or an ITA Pinata.
I'm not so interested in running the car in ITB as I am about making the ECU ruling more fair to cars that don't have EFI. The ruling, as I read and interpret it, allows EFI cars to run anything they'd like on top of the factory system. Unfortunately, the non-EFI cars (in particular CIS and CIS-E cars - BMW, MB, Volvo and VW come to mind), don't have that benefit since their injection system is little more than a glorified electronic carburetor. I'm not sure how to address this but have been sorely disappointed with the ITAC's initial allowance of open ECUs - the rumor mill says that this was because the cheating was so rampant and there was no simple way to verify ECU programming that the ITAC decided that it was better to finally legalize the cheating than to try and crack down on the various and sundry "tunes" being run in EFI cars.
Yes, I opted to race a VW product and I've been living with the drawbacks - this holds true for ANY car since we all know (hopefully) that there is no such thing as a perfect car. Honds are fast but twitchy and fragile, 240s are heavy and the engines are tempermental....the list of issues goes on and on...
I'll hang on to my POS a while longer - until someone wants to pay me way too much money for an ITA car so I can either move on to something different or just "retire".
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