No one has mentioned the GREEN.

I agree with Capt. and suggest keeping recoup. For me, that is what allowed me to enter the Challenge all the times I have. I don't have much mechanical ability, but I'm good at finding deals and selling off unneeded items in order to make the budget work. If you eliminate recoup, you'll eliminate potential participants like me who go for a bolt-on approach, rather than the engine swap/fabrication approach. I know I'll never compete with folks like the Nelsons with my approach, but that's okay. 

Classes

Production - bolt-on, no cages, 200tw autoX/DOT drags. These folks already show up. Give them a separate trophy package and see if participation increases.

Challenge - 2021 rules, let us continue to play

Outlaw - expanded Exhibition, no concours, no budget, no class trophy. Local cars, CrapCan racers, CAM builds, magazine projects, whatever! Motivation must be focused on beating Challenge cars, not winning the class. $500 if an Outlaw car wins dynamic.

Budget Tweaks

People have stashes of parts and we want to use them. We hafta keep some FMV, but kill the self-trading. Those dollars are spent somewhere and need to be accounted for. There is too much consternation here on the board in FMV self-trade threads.

I’m fine with pro-rating homogeneous lots. No reason to include the whole 150ct pack of zip-ties when I used 10. RRV for heterogeneous lots on the other hand, is ridiculous. Mixed lots should be treated like a parts car; put the whole lot in budget and sell off what you can for recoup. Selling to yourself at FMV is fine; you are burning your own recoup.

Exemptions could be trimmed down, but meh. Brake parts and SFI spinny bits are good to be exempt, but why a window net and not a trans blanket? If you go fast enough to require safety stuff, it goes in budget…Tires in/out is also a whatever for me. Can argue either way.

Inside deals are the black sheep no one wants to talk about. Not everyone has the same well to draw from and that is reflective of reality. Trying to level the playing field here is tough, and difficult to enforce. Not sure there is a clean cut answer; defining a buddy deal is akin to labeling a “street car.” DBAD.

Raise recoup if these changes will hurt the quality of builds, but I cannot imagine that being the case. Look at this year’s builds vs 10-15yrs ago, despite inflation decreasing everyone's buying power. Don’t mess with the $2000 branding. Budget build promotion is about perception and it needs to stay at a level where a majority are comfortable lighting that money on fire and walking away. More than $2k is too much.

Classing changes this year in an attempt to stimulate participation. Roll the budget tweaks in for 2023, giving everyone a chance to prepare or rework any in-progress builds.

Byrneon27 said:

Let's say the people who try get sucked into this new format (what I believe will happen is those who make the event interesting will no longer attend) 

You really think the Nelson's are going to show up with a stock fox body with a dry 50 shot? 

The Dasanti guy is going to bring a whatever the hell with no paint on it? 

If I toss together what amounts to a ST car it's going to be the most perfectly primped and tested car we've ever brought. Partially because contempt for rules is fun but moreso because if I can't turbocharge it I might just have time to paint it

That's why I suggested it as a second class.  Just like the other suggestions in this thread to let locals run, outlaw class, etc.  You would still have the primary focus of crazy $2000 builds

gumby said:

Don’t mess with the $2000 branding. Budget build promotion is about perception and it needs to stay at a level where a majority are comfortable lighting that money on fire and walking away. More than $2k is too much.

Agreed. As much as I like the 1k, 2k, 3k, "tiered" idea, the $2000 Challenge as the main is better for branding, and a simple number. I do think an outlaw/exhibition/whatever class should also be allowed and encouraged, while having the main prizes, etc focused at the $2000 class. 

I have mixed feelings on recoup. 

On the one side, if you take it away the elevator pitch makes it quite simple to explain the challenge. We build race cars for $2000. 

On the the other side, if I start with $2000 cash in my pocket, and use recoup, I can easily spend $3-4k with $2k, and I think this is a very Grassroots thing that is good to show people. If I buy a car for $1000, and a parts truck for $1000, keep the LS, sell the rest of parts and stuff off the truck for $1000 and then use that to buy parts to finish the build, I am still only using the original $2000 I started with, while spending $3000. I know it's harder to explain, but it's also something that is good to show is possible. 

AWSX1686 (Forum Supporter) said:

gumby said:

Don’t mess with the $2000 branding. Budget build promotion is about perception and it needs to stay at a level where a majority are comfortable lighting that money on fire and walking away. More than $2k is too much.

Agreed. As much as I like the 1k, 2k, 3k, "tiered" idea, the $2000 Challenge as the main is better for branding, and a simple number. I do think an outlaw/exhibition/whatever class should also be allowed and encouraged, while having the main prizes, etc focused at the $2000 class. 

It can still be branded as the $2000 Challenge, with tiers that include higher price tags. 
 

It helps emphasize that those tiers are considered "less than". They can play, but the highest award they can achieve is in their tier. The overall winner still has to be built for $2K. 

Add a $500 prize for best dynamic time, and give it to the fastest dynamic time regardless of tier.  Gives the more expensive cars a reason to play. 

gumby said:

Classes

Production - bolt-on, no cages, 200tw autoX/DOT drags. These folks already show up. Give them a separate trophy package and see if participation increases.

Challenge - 2021 rules, let us continue to play

Outlaw - expanded Exhibition, no concours, no budget, no class trophy. Local cars, CrapCan racers, CAM builds, magazine projects, whatever! Motivation must be focused on beating Challenge cars, not winning the class. $500 if an Outlaw car wins dynamic.

 

Budget Tweaks

People have stashes of parts and we want to use them. We hafta keep some FMV, but kill the self-trading. Those dollars are spent somewhere and need to be accounted for. There is too much consternation here on the board in FMV self-trade threads.

I’m fine with pro-rating homogeneous lots. No reason to include the whole 150ct pack of zip-ties when I used 10. RRV for heterogeneous lots on the other hand, is ridiculous. Mixed lots should be treated like a parts car; put the whole lot in budget and sell off what you can for recoup. Selling to yourself at FMV is fine; you are burning your own recoup.

Exemptions could be trimmed down, but meh. Brake parts and SFI spinny bits are good to be exempt, but why a window net and not a trans blanket? If you go fast enough to require safety stuff it goes in budget…Tires in/out is also a whatever for me. Can argue either way.

Inside deals are the black sheep no one wants to talk about. Not everyone has the same well to draw from and that is reflective of reality. Trying to level the playing field here is tough and difficult to enforce. Not sure there is a clean cut answer; defining a buddy deal is akin to labeling a “street car.” DBAD.

Raise recoup if these changes will hurt the quality of builds, but I cannot imagine that being the case. Look at this year’s builds vs 10-15yrs ago, despite inflation. Don’t mess with the $2000 branding. Budget build promotion is about perception and it needs to stay at a level where a majority are comfortable lighting that money on fire and walking away. More than $2k is too much.

Classing changes this year as an attempt to stimulate participation. Roll in the budget tweaks for 2023 to give everyone a chance to prepare or rework any in-progress builds.

I've been waiting to chime in, and gumby's post here covers about where my thinking is at, especially regarding most of the budgeting tweaks. 

My take on classing is slightly different:

$2000 - Updates for the budget tweaks and wherever tire rules land. Tire rules have evolved over time, multiple times. (I bought a $500 set of kumhos when they were a sponsor and the only budget exempt tires.)

$4000/Outlaw - same build rules, including $1000 Max recoup. Lower prize money?

Exhibition comp cars - run whatever as long as it meets safety and is a class legal car in some other racing venue. Awards that are not actual prizes or $$, just "coolest/spirit of the challenge" type.

I'd be interested in reading/watching (more vid content!) about all of those, and how they stack up against each other.

The thing I can't decide about is where rookie/lowest barrier to entry would fall. Maybe a "street" award within each for legally streetable cars w/ street tires? 

Do the recoup rules help dedicated competitors or does it bring in new people?  It is one of the big turnoffs for me at the event.  I don't want to spend my weekends being an accountant or chasing people down on facebook marketplace.  It makes it harder to buy a cheap running car, bolt on some suspension and tires, and go play.  When I went in 2018, I didn't get back to below the $2K budget until a month before the event.  If I hadn't sold the last piece of interior trim, I would have probably canceled my entry.  As a casual competitor straight $3K budget is significantly more interesting to me than a $2K budget + $1K recoup.

SV reX said:

eastsideTim said:

In reply to SV reX :

Was it that long ago that a wheel came off a car on the autox?  I'm getting old.

It was 2007. It was my kids that were in the line of fire.
 

If the lugs had been tightened according to spec and according to NHRA requirements, it wouldn't have happened. No new rule was needed. 

I remember that... I'm the guy that ran down the tire and kicked it so it would wobble to a stop sooner - it was seriously flying through the pits. 

I've explained the Challenge to a bunch of my Miata club friends. The recoup concept is easily understood, so are the exemptions. FMV and self trading starts the confused looks. Most of the members understand my $2000 car can really get to be a $3000 car and they're fine with that. While a few people think it's a neat competition, none of them have expressed any desire to build a car and spend five days trucking down to Florida and back. I'm in the camp that doesn't really think the rules are what's keeping people from participating. It's a one time per year event that requires a lot of effort and expense. That's a small group of interested parties to me. I enjoy the comradery, the weirdo builds, and the light hearted atmosphere. Nirvana would be a car that relegates the second place car to a dynamic score less than 90%, then I'd take a 12 for the concourse and sit back and have a beer. An article on the car in the magazine would make my life complete. Now figure out how to sell that to another 50 people.

AWSX1686 (Forum Supporter) said:

gumby said:

Don’t mess with the $2000 branding. Budget build promotion is about perception and it needs to stay at a level where a majority are comfortable lighting that money on fire and walking away. More than $2k is too much.

Agreed. As much as I like the 1k, 2k, 3k, "tiered" idea, the $2000 Challenge as the main is better for branding, and a simple number. I do think an outlaw/exhibition/whatever class should also be allowed and encouraged, while having the main prizes, etc focused at the $2000 class. 

"$2000 Challenge" is unique, while "Budget Challenge" or even "Grassroots Challenge" are less so (though "Grassroots Challenge" does go in with magazine branding too, which could be a good thing, and does open the possibility of other budget levels)

This is all i can add presently and I'm walking away from all rule discussions:

rule changes kill desire to participate.  The 1 page $2015 rules were brilliant.  And participation jumped back up.  More rules = less cars = event is a bigger albatross for the company. 
 

i have lots of visions and builds in my head.  It takes me a while to collect and document parts.  If the rules change drastically in that timeline I just wasted part of my life and have to start over.  I've done that several times with this event and sold stuff off at rule changes, even mostly complete cars that i miss dearly and would have fit back in with the simplified rules.  
 

I just don't have it in me to shoot at a moving target anymore, and it would break my heart to see guys like Warren with multi year builds be left out in the cold or told "you can't win anything but come do exhibition" which amounts to towing 1100 miles for a Test and Tune day.  It costs me close to $2000 to attend the event between 2000 miles of diesel, hotels, food, and entry fees before a dime of the car itself or driving around the eastern third of the country to chase cheap cars and parts comes into play.  It has to offer me something I feel is worth that investment of basically my entire yearly racing budget and right now this whole thread has killed my spirit and drive to do anything other than race locally and stop chasing deals.  

3 Classes.

$2K OG – No exemptions.  If it’s on the car it’s in the budget.  Throwback to the original rules.

$2K RB – Primarily based current exemptions and rules with tweaks (primarily a whole lot less wording)..

$2K PE – Replaces exhibition.  Vehicles that don’t meet OG or RB requirements.  Entries are included in this for event volume and direct completion comparison value only – no main prizes, only sub category prizes.  Party Entry – you brought a car to check things out (limit to rookie or sophomores only), Principal Exceedance – you built a car with the intent to meet the budget limit but it went over $2K, Poorly Executed – you have a car that (or is built with the intent to) exploits budget and/or rule ‘spirit of the event’ ethos – specifically the self trade and FMV abuses.

Allows simple “$2K” marketing and branding.

One page rules.

All classes should require a mass produced production body (RB and OG) and production frame (OG).    The Bradley was well executed and legal to the 2021 rules, but will likely turn off future prospective new entrants.  Matches original "no kit car" rule requirements.

Recoup rule remains.  Excluding recoup is stupid – we are building cars with $2K, we are not building $2K cars.  Recoup limit is beneficial to the overall event.

Scoring - balance the classes with a 25 OG / 20 RB / 10 PE normalization scale of the concour.  (There may be a risk of needed to add a whole page to explain how to multiply a score by .8 and .4 to help the mathematically challenged to understand this.)

To all the real Challenge Competitors,

There are a lot of non-attending and rarely attending people trying to influence the direction that this event goes.  Make sure you consider  if they "would attend if they get their way" when reading their commentary.  They already have plenty of "I didn't attend because...." reasons and will have more when the next rule set is written.  They know who they are and they will get twisted when they read this.  Just Sayin'.

In reply to wheels777 :

I'm one of them. 
 

I'm not gonna get twisted. I'd be happy to be considered by those terms. 

In reply to wheels777 :

since i'm the only person who has directly stated how much i stretched the self-trade allowance, i think it's safe to guess that your "Poorly Executed" is directed at me.  and I resent that.  i'd say my intent was perfectly executed, just not on a successful timeline.  ;-)

i'm aiming for an overall win, Best Engineered, Challengers Choice, and magazine cover.  if the rules change so much that I can not be considered for the overall, i'll still come for the other three.  and my future builds will be more aligned with your OG class since that's where i think the real challenge lies.

I've attended a few times, always as part of the parking lot build or fielding somebody else's car- and I've been thinking hard since the beginning of this thread about what would get me to build and enter my own car.

The answer might be nothing and that no amount of rules changes would make the build/don't build decision for me, just outside circumstances.  But more parking lot builds and things like that that condense all of the effort and time investment into the same weekend help immensely, a single event effort for a single event car, effectively.  No idea if that will spark a useful thought in anybody, I don't think I have a solution.

About recoup - if it's going to be allowed, why limit it?  Recoup is a bit like the "one red paperclip" stories where you marvel at the ingeniuity/bartering/lucky moves/research done by someone as they bootstrap their way into higher and higher values. If the goal is to show what can be built with actual out-of-pocket expenses of $2000, then take away the limits and watch the horse trading show. I know the limits were put in because Mongrel exploited them. Did that take away the potential for crazier and crazier cars?

But that's a very different story than "if it's on the car, it's in the budget". I think outsiders expect the Challenge to be the latter, not a bartering/trading/selling challenge. There is a difference between a $2000 car and a car that was built with $2000 in seed money.

I don't know if multiple classes really benefit the event. Again, it comes down to what GRM wants to get out of it. They're not an events company, they're a media company that needs content. Do multiple categories help with that? Or does it just make the elevator pitch longer? With a multi-class event, you really only have one class that anyone cares about. I was told by the TV crews at the Targa Newfoundland that my Open Division didn't really matter, the real race (and thus the coverage) was in the Targa Division. 

I'm not trying to influence the event here, I'm giving the perspective of someone who has only watched from afar, and casually. I won't likely ever enter for time and distance reasons, and I'm okay with that. The rule set is not a factor.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I think the answer is because the last time recoup was unlimited (2003), the winning team severely maximized the idea, and it was really hard to defend the event. 
 

IIRC, the V8 Miata had something like $14K in recoup. 

wheels777 said:

All classes should require a mass produced production body and frame.    The Bradley was well executed and legal to the 2021 rules, but will likely turn off future prospective new entrants. 

First, thank you for the phone call and heads up! While I certainly appreciate the accolades regarding my ability to understand the assignment and build to the limit of the rules as written, I still stand strongly opposed to your position on vehicle eligibility. I understand your desire in not lowering the bottom rungs of competition to increase participation, but I cannot follow any logic that whacks the top off of the ladder in hopes of improving the event.

This change would affect more than my build. It would decimate the whole Bad Decisions Triangle! And for what purpose?
If we are talking about magazine content and interesting builds, maybe we should rate the amount video time the BDT cars have in GRM's sizzle reel vs the rest of the field combined. Clearly, the staff finds our builds interesting. What about Concours? Three of the top5 scores are BDT. The Bradley finished second to Wreck Racing. Seems like it fits those subjective parameters, and the judges liked it as well. Challengers' Choice? Yup, BDT.

As I understand original intent, the challenge issued was "what can you build with $1500?" The limit of the event is the budget, much more than the method of reaching it. So, who exactly would be turned off by the style of chassis construction used or the number of bodies originally produced, and what exactly is the objection?

Finally, please do not construe any of this as written in anger. I can agree to disagree and still be friendly with most people. I am honestly trying to understand this point of view which excludes alternate constructions while stifling imagination and creativity.

PS. I noticed your edit while I was formulating this reply. Are you now allowing tube chassis in RB, but still no kit car bodies?

SV reX said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

IIRC, the V8 Miata had something like $14K in recoup. 

ddavidv is the only Mongrel still active on the board, so i hope he chimes in on this.  my IIRC is different than yours.  i think they had $4k, not $14k, in recoup.

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

That's good. I know it was big, and hope it wasn't as big as I posted. 
 

I appreciate your correction if I erred.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I hear you, but I disagree. 
 

The reality of recoup is that I can start a build with $2000 in cash, and COMPLETE the build. 
 

I understand there are more expenses involved and that some folks don't get it. That's ok. Most folks don't get the Challenge. 

I like how Tom said hey no slicks.  Then said ok we'll rethink that but we need more teams to make the Challenge work.  That turned into 16 pages of rules tossing around.

In reply to SV reX :

The other rule change they inspired may have been more significant- no initial purchase price over the max budget.  According to the spotters guide, the purchase price on the Miata was $2600.  I seem to recall discussion that under those rules, one could theoretically buy multiple new C5 Corvettes, mostly part them out and assemble the rest into one car.

Stampie said:

I like how Tom said hey no slicks.  Then said ok we'll rethink that but we need more teams to make the Challenge work.  That turned into 16 pages of rules tossing around.

With very little solid justification on how any of it would bring new people in.