I believe I know what your point was Sam (to take issue with the "perfect attendance" slur) and setting that aside, Gordon's main point was that the board wants to (A) promote competition in our TT series and (B) discern what the majority of members want. The member survey responses (now 206! of them) paint a clear picture, which carries a lot of weight, at least with me.chaos4NH wrote:Fred, my point was to take exception to the statement that the championships were attendance awards. Sure, some classes have been less then hotly contested in the past few years, but how would that have changed if there was a best of N scoring method? Deducting points from the scores of frequent attendees seems contrary to the goal of encouraging participation. I doubt we would be gaining attendance with best of N. I still feel that best of N gives the opportunity to Skip events, especially $$$$$ away events.boltonite wrote:I feel compelled to respond to a few "points" that have been made in this thread:
1. Sam, by your own reckoning, a few 2009 class championships were won by drivers who attended only 3 or 4 events, explain to me how a Best-of-N makes this worse? It seems to me those class championships would be totally unaffected or is there something I am missing?
To answer your question (about how the Best-of-N affects competition), in a few classes there will likely be a competitor who is 99% guaranteed to attend every event, making it extremely unlikely that anyone else who cannot attend all events will win the class -- this is believed by me (and others) to have a "chilling" affect on enthusiasm for the entire TT series and it does not help to promote participation ESPECIALLY later in the season after a missed event or DNF takes you out of contention, as it does under the current points system.
For good-to-mediocre drivers in mediocre cars who attend all events, a Best-of-N system will not help you. For good drivers in good cars, a Best-of-N will not hurt you. For good-to-mediocre drivers in good cars who cannot attend every event, a Best-of-N system will give you a shot at the championship against the "perfect attendance" guy, but you will be handicapped for missed events so you can only win by out-performing your competition. We cannot please everyone, nor should we, but we can try to promote competition and participation so we can continue to have a healthy series of events at more tracks, rather than fewer events at fewer tracks, as we've seen happen in the past...
FF