The other evening at Howie's while we were waiting around for the traffic to die down and waiting to see if Rico was going to be able to make it. We started discussing our options for the various classes for the upcoming season. One topic was our Classic Sports Car Class which seems to be a crowd favorite. The discussion mainly consisted of changing the motor spec to slow it down a little.
As I was packing up cars at home to make room for the plumbing work we are having done, a couple of things occurred to me. As we are all aware this class has gotten faster and faster over the last couple of years, as a result we have really narrowed the field to the few models that can compete at that speed. At the same time there are a wealth of other cars that pretty much sit on a shelf as a consequence. Some of the other models like Ninco's Austin Healy, 356s, Cobra, Testarossa, ect. are great looking cars, but without heavy modifications are just out of the running. There are also all the great MRRC cars and some of the Monogram/Revell cars that would compete more at a slower speed. There are also many of the front motored cars that can be made to run very well, just not at the speeds we've been running lately.
While trying to pick a car for the IPS proxy last year I put a BWA motor in my Fly 250LM. the car was a joy to drive, smooth, quiet, cornered very well, then I reread the rules that called for Inline set up only.
This brings up another point I didn't think of at the time, one of the things we discussed was eliminating the division 2 (podded chassis) and modeling the class after a proxy such as the IPS, TLOR or Pan-American mainly to encourage participation in these proxies. Later I remembered that podded chassis are allowed in these proxies and as a result these cars are running much faster lap times than in past years. So then there is the question of modifying chassis, a lot of these proxies want inline chassis, that means either modifying or eliminating some of the great sidewinder cars that are out there. At the same time at one of last years proxies there were a couple of MRRC/Monogram Sebring chassis that had been modified to fit a C130 can motor. These were a couple of the best handling cars there.
Another thing that has become apparent in these proxies is that at 13k the FF (slimline) motors are unable to compete with the C130 can 13k motors. Some proxies have started scoring these separately. I don't know if we might to make an adjustment there or if there is even any adjustment that can be made. However I've noticed that on my cars the new Minnow 18k and the H&R Jack Rabbit 14k motor run very close together, I think it is more a matter of torque rather than RPM.
So it seems like there is much more discussion to be had and that's just this one class. I meant to just make a short note, because I'll never remember all these things when we are talking about them.
Then there is our F1 class, but that's another story.