brucesallen wrote:Many years ago when SP was ceated as a highly modified engine, street-chassis car I was totally opposed to 4, 6, 8 cyl as SPC, SPB, SPA but if you look at the history of competitors it has worked amazingly well. Don't change it. The purity of SP became tainted when we treated 944s with their large displacement as different. Don't forget that is legal for a Miata to be in SPC with a homemade 5 liter four cylinder engine costing $100,000. Or a mustang to be in SPA with a blown 2,000 horsepower custom engine (just no nitro).
We need MORE radical mods to compete for these little troohies!
Hi Bruce,
I'm not convinced its worked so well, nor of its 'purity'.
I realize that I'm a bad example, not being a 'regular', but thats due to the onerous requirement of having to compete with 1.6l against cars with 50% greater displacement. (YES...I acknowledge I am allowed to shoehorn that 5l 4 banger in there). So, I simply don't run as many events as I might otherwise.
The fun of actually competing on a level playing field is removed, for sake of 'purity'.
Funneling 5 levels of ST down to only 3 at SP makes little sense now that so many competitive cars have aged to the point where owners would probably be willing to mod them a bit further, to SP level.
Further, besides discouraging people from modding their cars (hey, isn't tweaking our ride part of this madness we call a hobby?), its simply unheard of to have cylinder count as the criteria. Is ther any other club or racing organization out there that uses a classification system like this?
I posted my long-winded plea for revision several years ago on the old message board, but the displacement formulas suggested there are probably still relevant today.
Part of the rebuttal then, was that there weren't enough SP level cars to populate more than 3 classes. With the proliferation of late model STi's, E36 M3's, older 911s and similar, now already having migrated to SP, there would surely be enough participants to justify 4 or 5 SP levels and likely encourage others to make the leap.
just my .03
