Tom1200 said:So with all that said here is my idea: a claimer class......................you can do anything you want but anyone can buy your car for 300K.
I thought that sounded like a great idea until I was mulling it over while grabbing gas at lunch. Taking it to it's logical conclusion, which in racing is pretty basic as people tend to push things to their illogical conclusion....
First if this is a pro series where you are spending hundreds of millions you tend to have new cars every year, and unless you are Ferrari and can sell a few to your exclusive customers for multiple millions, there's not much use for old race cars until they hit historic racing. So, if you can have your car claimed after every race all you have done is a)force the rate of development so you're coming out with substantial upgrades every race as you know the competition will get last weeks hot E36 M3 from you. Second, you life all your components for one race not caring they could fail the next time it moves, as you are not planning on using it again. Now, if you limit the claiming to 1-2 times a year, again, you've added cost as they just plan on making the cars obsolete and either selling them for $300K or scrapping them. No biggie when you're spending hundreds of millions.
Next if you're talking 'club racing' then you've just made it easier for the Scott Tuckers who literally have already dropped $2 mil to build a car for one event and have no further use for it. Last I heard his D sports racer went to Australia less engine. Note I recall something about it was such a specialized one off it needed to be treated like an F1 engine with pre warming, then different maps for warm up and racing, then another map to shut it down or it would seize up if you just stopped it, plus a life span of one race. Alternatively you just make it so the rich guy can buy the best car leaving the poor guy who may have 'only' spent $100K building it,without his pride and joy that has taken years and years of hard work and dedication in their garage workshop. That person is now disincentivized to ever try again.
This has sort of been seen in Lemons. They did away with crushing a car at every race (spectators curse or something?) as it was so unpopular with racers who saw their hard work and hours destroyed it was eliminated. With local level circle track racing it works because the people at that level aren't in a cubic money war to start with. The people who are uber serious about their racing are racing in higher, non claimer classes.
Look at kids karting, or even better quarter midgets. With some something that locked down you see guys turning up with one kart on an open trailer doing everything as a family, and you see dads paying for semi's full of (I'm not kidding) 3-4 chassis, multiple engines, masses of spares and many hundreds of thousand of $$"s for a year. What the hell would happen if those classes were open. Imagine the dyno hours that already happen with spec sealed engines, what happens when you're looking for the last 0.0000000000000001%.
I think open rules worked 'back when' because technology was still advancing so far and fast that there were many paths to the same result. Now technology, modeling and simulation are at the point where you are looking at ever diminishing levels or return which adds cubic dollars. The exception being places like Pikes Peak and the Dakar where the environment dictates that there are still different routs to success. Hell, if Rouge Cow or McLaren decided to throw some serious coin at Pikes Peak and put Hamilton or Mad Max in the car I bet they could, probably after a few years to figure it out, build a car that would make Lobe in his Peugeot look like me driving a Reliant three wheel up there with one dead cylinder. The fact that it may cost a few hundred million wouldn't matter if they find a wealthy backer with an open checkbook. Heck, I recall McLaren came very close to building a Land Speed record car, which should be added to the list of true open classes still, but (thankfully?) couldn't get funding for it. That plan was basically to build a ground effect plane with full DBW which essentially flew along the ground using electronics to control it's pitch and yaw while the meat sack pointed it in it's general direction. Like modern jet fighters it would be impossible for a meat sack to control it. The meat sack is just there to tell it what he or she wants it to do, and the 'vehicle' electronics do the rest. The wheels were basically just hanging down on very soft springs once in motion so they were just in contact with the ground for minimum rolling resistance and not actually transferring the mass of the vehicle to the ground.
I know I keep sounding like a nay sayer. I love the idea of open classes, I just realize that in reality we are pining for something through rose tinted specs thats time has passed.
