ITAC News.

[JoshS]

Josh, I'm SOOOOO confused with what's going on and what the current direction / stance on things are right now. I had thought that no cars already classed were going to be up for review and weight or class changes. Then the Civic si gets reclassed which has been in ITS for a long, long time.

It's not that simple. We will make weight adjustments or reclass cars if the current listing appears to be an ERROR. Again, the "bar" right now for adjusting weight or class is that there have to be two basically identical cars, drivetrain-wise, with different classifications/weights, indicating that one of them must be an error because any reasonable person would classify them the same. Or alternately, if a car is classed at an unattainable weight, we'll try to reclass it.

This Civic kind of got both worlds. There were decent arguments on both sides of the "attainable weight" thing. In addition, at the same time we were classing the next-generation car with the very same engine, and THAT car was clearly going to ITA.

Now requests are coming in for other existing cars? Are they getting the "no changes will be allowed" response?

The volume of requests for looking at old listings hasn't really changed in either direction for the last few years. Some of the requests are just to fix bad spec line info or correct model years -- those are pretty straightforward. We have two of those this month. Most requests for weight adjustments will get the "no basis for a change" response but others might be considered errors and will get corrected. We just have to look through each letter and decide if there's any real basis for change.

If not, what has happened to all of the previous cars that were being reviewed and had letters sent in? I know I've never seen anything posted on my request and it's been a damn long time even though it had been reviewed. I'm sure many other people haven't received answers.

Give me a letter number or a date and I'll try to figure out what happened with older requests. I will say that every letter that was on the agenda for last month either got sent to the CRB or was tabled, and therefore, the authors should have received an automated response when that happened. If you or anyone wrote a letter more than a month ago and have not received anything about it or seen something in Fastrack, then the letter is NOT pending and either there was a failure to get the resolution into Fastrack or the letter was lost. The new letter tracking system is backed by a database and pretty much guarantees that nothing can fall through the cracks and has a record of the resolution of each letter, but in the old system we just hope we kept good notes. Member feedback about the new system has been excellent. In any case, send me e-mail with enough info about your letter for me to track it down, and I'll let you know what I find and we'll come up with the right approach for it depending on what turns up.