How about a pay-per-view? Set $1,000,000 on the finish line of a 100 lap race, no rules. The first team that enters gets pole, the rest of the starting positions are drawn from a hat.
How about a pay-per-view? Set $1,000,000 on the finish line of a 100 lap race, no rules. The first team that enters gets pole, the rest of the starting positions are drawn from a hat.
APEowner said:Definitely gone now said:It doesn't need to be BoP, it needs to be BoB. Balance of Budget. Open rules, do what you can with ingenuity, only $xxx,xxx.xx allowed to be spent on car. The other guy figures out something cool? great! Now you better get as smart or smarter to keep up. We need thinkers, not millionaires.
I think something like this has potential. It seem like you might need to control development spending somehow as well to avoid millions of dollars being spent on things like wind tunnel work.
The answer might be using "off the shelf parts only."
In reply to Definitely gone now :
Requiring OE parts is why BTCC cylinder heads cost ten times what Formula 1 cylinder heads did. Gotta buy a lot of them to find the ones with good core shift, and machining was allowed so they would get ported and angle milled and all sorts of stuff and often the wall thicknesses were so thin in spots that they were only good for a couple heat cycles before they cracked.
It should also be noted that NASCAR engines have always used "off the shelf" parts, too.
In reply to Red5 :
Wasn't that the plot to "Death Race 2000"?
Seems to me that every suggestion is just a BoP in a different way- instead of one that changes through the season, it's one that is there all of the time.
Spec parts are the ultimate BoP, since everything is exactly the same. This is where NASCAR is now. The only thing differentiating the cars is the money spent on engines and shocks.
Spec budget is also a major BoP, since it limits the driver of what normally separates the excessive performance.
Limits are always there to let each team reach a specific limit to hope they are all the same in the end.
And I'm still curious how people think CanAm was the pinnacle in racing. This was an era that winners won by laps, sometime multiple ones, over a fairly short race. Sure, the cars were fast, but the racing sucked. Even the "glory days" of CART in the 80's- winners would regularly win by a lap. This is where medium investment teams really cringe at getting into racing- what's the point if you are just going to be lapped 5-10 times over 3 hours? It's one thing for a person to go out and have fun, it's another thing to ask Kroger to put their name on a car that's only seen on TV when it's getting lapped.
Seems that back in the "glory days" the fascination was more about how dangerous it was than the actual racing.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:In reply to Definitely gone now :
Requiring OE parts is why BTCC cylinder heads cost ten times what Formula 1 cylinder heads did. Gotta buy a lot of them to find the ones with good core shift, and machining was allowed so they would get ported and angle milled and all sorts of stuff and often the wall thicknesses were so thin in spots that they were only good for a couple heat cycles before they cracked.
It should also be noted that NASCAR engines have always used "off the shelf" parts, too.
If the goal is unlimited innovation with close competition then I'm not sure that will help. Off the shelf parts don't necessarily bolt together in innovative ways and as Pete pointed out the way to gain an advantage in series the require them is to buy a crapload, test them all and only use the ones that perform the best.
Ultimate Track Car Challenge with NO corporate funding.
...how do you reward creativity while preventing the larger checkbook from always winning?
...Can we design a modern, wide-open race series?
These are two VERY different questions. Which is the real one being asked for when people complain about BOP and reminisce about the innovative cars of yesteryear?
For me, it's the former more than the latter. So I would focus on a rule set that inherently creates a BOP by reducing the advantages of budget and increasing the advantages of creativity. As far as I can tell, the primary advantage that big budget teams have over their rivals isn't in the cost of the car itself, but in the value of the data accumulated that is applicable to the current rule set. So for a top-tier professional level series, I'd like to see something like:
1) Focus on only being substantially restrictive on a few key performance enablers at a time.
2) Regularly change which key performance enablers are being substantially restricted. The first 3 years may focus on combined tire width, drag coefficient, and total fuel per race. The next 3 years might focus on minimum weight, number of tires per race, and fuel flow rate. The restrictions have to be variable enough to substantially change the 'winning' formula and invalidate some key data accumulation that would have been specific to the prior rule set.
3) Budget cap and size limit the entire team that touches the car or its underlying data. Think of the driver as your QB, and your engineers and mechanics are the rest of the players. To field 2 cars, you may only have 50 slots to split between engineers, mechanics, and drivers, with a total salary cap of $25M.
I have a really stupid idea for an amateur series.
Classing by budget rather than specification.
$2k, $5k, $10k, $50k, $100k, "my IPO made national news".
It's almost certain that people would overspend their category rendering the whole thing useless. I'm just trying to figure out how to accept that there will always be people who bring a big checkbook relative to the median cost of a given series without either fruitlessly saying "you can't do that" or having the usual situation of anybody who can't or won't do that being relegated to also-rans. We have something kind of like this in that there are more and less expensive classes, but explicitly making the breaks dollars instead of specifications?
I know, I know... there are people who break every rule in Jr kart racing. I guess the other part of it goes back to my notion of non-participant sponsors and the ethos/spirit/culture of the series. How do we make it uncool to be a spending overdog? There are so many endeavors that are plainly difficult and for which there is no glory in spending your way past the hard parts; I know you can't literally be deposited on top of Everest via helicopter, but if you could, you still couldn't say you'd climbed it. That understanding sort of needs to be part of the culture of the series.
But I digress. How do we provide a target that doesn't boil down to a fiscal arms race? It's always going to be expensive, but resource parity could make a big difference. You could say that we have this because we have the Challenge, we have Lemons, and we have F1, but I think in the context of an "open" race series that framework takes on a new significance. Everyone gets the same $0.01 blank sheet of paper. What can you do within your self-selected budget? Performance for a given dollar becomes the target, not just all the performance you can afford in hopes that you can afford more than the next person.
In reply to Jesse Ransom :
While your opinion is certainly valid it lacks one issue.
The driver.
With identical cars. Here, pick a number out of a hat type series. Someone will always win. The rest will lose.
Maybe it's skill or hunger, knowledge or luck? It takes long races to eliminate the factor of luck and a long series to showcase real winners.
No lie I just want an enclosed Kart based class. Any tire, any production engine at 500cc or lower. Fully enclosed and with serious downforce kept in check with body sqf limitations and fuel limits.
OR unlimited offroad kart racing where the tub is spec as are the suspension pickups and rational tires to keep the super high power out of the class.
To be clear I don't think its possible at all, I just want a 917K replica with 50% of the power of a factory car that is fully caged and runs on pump gas and a few people to run against.
Tractor pulling has a class called "unlimited modified". I think the only rules besides safety stuff are a maximum weight limit and tire size.
This is the class where you will see a tractor with ten blown hemis linked together, or multiple engines from military aircraft, like turbines and allison v16's. Its wild. Bring your ear plugs. I can only imagine the build budgets. It works because it's not wheel to wheel competition.
gearheadmb said:Tractor pulling has a class called "unlimited modified". I think the only rules besides safety stuff are a maximum weight limit and tire size.
...It works because it's not wheel to wheel competition.
...and the vehicles are tethered to sort of "calibrated immovable objects."
I saw this live, indoors(!), at the Cow Palace in San Francisco when I was a kid. When you got to an opening onto the arena from a corridor the sound would make you stumble.
MadScientistMatt said:Haven't really worked out a business model yet, but the starting point idea would be something like "Here are the safety rules, here are the specs for the fuel you need, and you get X gallons for the race. Have at it!"
Probably the best business approach would be to pitch it as a new top level for an existing racing organization - or if an existing series needed a do-over. Come to think of it - when was the last time you heard much about the Indy 500?
Your concept sounds similar to 80s group c racing
gearheadmb said:Tractor pulling has a class called "unlimited modified". I think the only rules besides safety stuff are a maximum weight limit and tire size.
This is the class where you will see a tractor with ten blown hemis linked together, or multiple engines from military aircraft, like turbines and allison v16's. Its wild. Bring your ear plugs. I can only imagine the build budgets. It works because it's not wheel to wheel competition.
Sounds like the GRM top speed challenge I just proposed. Comply with the safety regulations and with a challenge budget see how fast you can go.
For some reason I like the stock car idea. But with more of a V8 supercar vibe using actual road courses, not just ovals. Not tube frame racecars though; just body-in-whites with all the safety scaffolding, factory drivetrain layouts and OE based engines.
iansane said:For some reason I like the stock car idea. But with more of a V8 supercar vibe using actual road courses, not just ovals. Not tube frame racecars though; just body-in-whites with all the safety scaffolding, factory drivetrain layouts and OE based engines.
Well v8 SuperCar is tube frame and they all use the same chassis
In reply to MotorsportsGordon :
Yeah those chassis' are crazy to see stripped down. I just meant utilizing more tracks than ovals and a few token road courses.
APEowner said:Pete. (l33t FS) said:In reply to Definitely gone now :
Requiring OE parts is why BTCC cylinder heads cost ten times what Formula 1 cylinder heads did. Gotta buy a lot of them to find the ones with good core shift, and machining was allowed so they would get ported and angle milled and all sorts of stuff and often the wall thicknesses were so thin in spots that they were only good for a couple heat cycles before they cracked.
It should also be noted that NASCAR engines have always used "off the shelf" parts, too.
If the goal is unlimited innovation with close competition then I'm not sure that will help. Off the shelf parts don't necessarily bolt together in innovative ways and as Pete pointed out the way to gain an advantage in series the require them is to buy a crapload, test them all and only use the ones that perform the best.
I don't think so. What I'm talking about the teams would have a very limited budget. So they can't afford to purchase 40 cylinder heads. They can afford one. And sure, they could purchase/return until they get just the most perfect cylinder possible. But that's time consuming and would not be likely to happen. After they aquire a part the team can set about using ingenuity to modify it and make it better, but not make it different. Similar to autocross rules.
Unlimited budget, unlimited car design, unlimited development, but... your driver has to be in high school, legitimately, and maintain a certain grade average.
Realistic idea, develop anything you want, but it has to be done entirely shade tree style. What I mean by this is no data is allowed. No development data other than a stop watch, literally, no gps, no sensors, nothing but a guy holding a stop watch to track sector times. This would cut down MASSIVELY on the budget requirement and incentivize a lot of creativity. In the spirit of that, no CAD either, unless we're talking of the cardboard variety.
This speaks to me personally, as I've never had the advantage of data, everything I've done has been a seat-of-the-pants feedback loop, and the adventure has been fun, if occasionally expensive by way of "oops" haha.
Definitely gone now said:APEowner said:Definitely gone now said:It doesn't need to be BoP, it needs to be BoB. Balance of Budget. Open rules, do what you can with ingenuity, only $xxx,xxx.xx allowed to be spent on car. The other guy figures out something cool? great! Now you better get as smart or smarter to keep up. We need thinkers, not millionaires.
I think something like this has potential. It seem like you might need to control development spending somehow as well to avoid millions of dollars being spent on things like wind tunnel work.
The answer might be using "off the shelf parts only."
Which shelf?
I'd like something like car must be purchased from a dealership as sold to the public plus $100,000 to upgrade safety parts, pads, tires, fluids, etc but other than that exactly as made from factory. Get us more homologation specials.
BTW, while throwing all this around do away with qualifying.
Run the races with the starting line up set by reverse points. You lead the points series, you start last.
Or if you have so many participants that you must have qualifying to limit the field, run the qualifying heats reverse points.
Or you could have the starting position decided by pulling a numbered ping pong ball out of a bag. I know, really high tech.
Whoever came up with "You have the fastest car so you get to start in first place" anyway?
In reply to Driven5 who quoted :
...how do you reward creativity while preventing the larger checkbook from always winning?
...Can we design a modern, wide-open race series?
Thanks for isolating that. My thinking isn't entirely converged just yet, but seeing it that way has been clarifying for me.
I'll agree with most here, though, that "a modern, wide-open race series" isn't possible. Heck, even World Solar Challenge is a "limited series"... since they were "going too fast" beginning in 2005.
There's a linkage here, which I'm not certain has been made explicit: "an exciting, extensively creative, series is only possible and popular within an 'unlimited rules format'."
I don't think that's necessarily true. Although, I'll admit that any series that orients its marketing around "being the most diverse and creative series anywhere", is going to have an up-hill battle to fight. Which is not to imply that such is an unsurmountable challenge. Merely particularly difficult, in an already crowded space; one that's dominated by various organizations/entities claiming to be "preeminent" and/or "pinnacle" displays of motorsports.
Say 30 teams
All in say Crown Victorias
All get a 10# NOS bottle to use whenever they wanted during the race but no more than that, when you are out you are out
All in spec tires
2.4 hours of racing on each course
Sell it on pay per view
I know, I know...
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