I believe that this is the quote in question. For clarity, I’ll go into further detail with some additional context regarding exactly “how” the Super classes came to be – it’s certainly a legitimate question that perhaps I breezed over too quickly in my prior post.blindsidefive0 wrote:As for looking back into history - absolutely. I know that Chris Parsons and I have taken a guess at just about every single car that has come through this club in the last few years, as well as a bunch of other "common" track day cars/builds that we might see in the future - this, along with mathematically consistent spreads, comparison with other power/weight competitive clubs, etc. is where the Super U/A/B/C/D cutoffs came from. There are definitely some outliers that are tough to place (e.g. Butch or even the Formula Vee, which is just so slow no matter what class you create for it...).
In getting back to the roots of the original Touring & Super proposal (going way back in time to about 1 year ago now), we knew that we wanted something like Touring (i.e. a points-based system for classing what are essentially production cars). We also knew that we needed something that was “beyond” a points-based system for the cars that were unclassifiable, drivers that wouldn’t want to deal with the points, kit cars and other either low-production and/or customizable cars, and for other cars that were just too damn fast (or at least too heavily modified) to be allowed to rip it up in Touring. Also, just about any other time trial/time attack club that we looked at had a set of classes like these, including COMSCC (Prepared), NASA (at the time it was their TTS/TTU/TTR classes), CASC (Modified), and NARRA (all their classes). Note that NASA, CASC, and NARRA all have power/weight based classes. This research, along with both technical and philosophical discussions about what makes a car “go” and other discussions that at this point I just can’t remember, is why we landed on power to weight based classes. I’m sure there’s an old forum thread with about five dozen posts on this very topic.
Given that, how did we get to the current number of classes and cutoffs? I will first state that we did not take prior COMSCC results, guess on the weight/power, and then try to fabricate classes that minimize the gap in time from first to last. Personally, I feel this would have been a poor approach, especially given the motley collection of Prepared/Street Prepared drivers and cars we’ve had in the past, relatively small number of potential Super Class competitors (at the time we assumed, correctly, that many of these competitors would move to a Touring class), and inconsistent results within these classes given the fact that this group is continually shifting with different levels of prep and talent. What we aimed to do, instead, was create a set of classes that work for the type of cars that COM typically sees and would typically expect to see over the next several years.
The issue around the number of Super classes has ended up being more about filling a need to find a home for for lower-powered cars more than anything. The original proposal had 3 Super classes, U/A/B. Picking initial cutoffs was a process that involved using other clubs as a benchmark, estimates of where COMSCC competitors would fall, and a lot of scenarios. To set the SU/SA cutoff, we looked at the high-end of other clubs and justified/invalidated these benchmarks based on what we saw as basically the fastest potential Prepared A car (i.e. to try to keep most non-formula cars out of Super Unlimited). Then we ran some scenarios with known cars/builds in T100 versus Super B so that Super B’s potential was faster, although not significantly so, compared to T100. Finally, we moved the Super A/B cutoff in between so that the distribution wasn’t overly lopsided while gut checking against some known P/SP matchups. Note that this is a slight over simplification of the actual events as this was an iterative process over the course of several weeks and months.
Feedback from the 2012 NHMS-4 event led us to consider adding another class for cars that aren’t particularly fast (neither on paper nor in real life), but don’t qualify for Touring (like a kit car). At this point we busted out random spreadsheets, Google documents, and scrap paper to try to determine what the lower bound should be. We took a guess on more cars, played around with different inter-class spreads, and finally landed on Super U/A/B/C, which never really made it into any "real" proposal as Super classes got killed prior to the membership vote on the rules at the end of last year.
This year’s revised proposal includes 5 classes, Super U/A/B/C/D, based on subjective feedback provided by members of the club. We had toyed around with 5 classes last year, but never went through with it. However, what we did determine, or at least make a subjective call on, is that based on potential overlap with the Touring classes, we felt that the 16.0 mark was absolutely as low as you could go. Using this as a starting point for Super D, as well as the old SU/SA mark for the high end, it was a matter of 1) getting a relatively even spread mathematically within each class (i.e. it doesn’t make much sense to have a 10% weight/power range between the upper and lower bounds of Super B with a 60% range within Super A) and 2) again, gut-checking against known match-ups (coming back to the guys I previously mentioned on the cusp of Super A/B).
So at this point, yes, we’ve taken a guess at just about every car that’s come through here in the last few years. Yes, this was an input into the classing. However, no, it was not our goal to simply minimize the gap from first-to-last in the Super classes. There were a lot of factors, and it was an iterative process.
Going back to post #1 of this whole thread, one of the things we are looking for is feedback on the number of classes and the cutoffs (are they too high, too many classes, not enough classes, does a particular cutoff separate some cars that “should” be competing, etc.)? Broad, sweeping criticisms are not particularly helpful at this point, unless another member or group of members wants to propose another fully baked set of rules. However, specific feedback on how to make Super “better”, is extremely helpful, and I hope that the half a dozen or so substantial changes made to Super since it was last revealed in October reflect this.
