American Iron and/or AIX series? What do you all think?

I've been tossing this idea around for a bit now. I think it would a blast to emulate a currently running full size series such as NASA's American Iron and/or the American Iron Extreme racing series. I've looked at both series rules package and here is what I think will work.

American Iron= 1960 to newer American cars 1410 KG (3100lbs) 345 HP (9.0hp/lbs) Racing medium tires

American Iron Extreme= 1960 newer (same as above) 1277 kg (2700lbs min weight as per NASA) HP unlimited Racing slicks

Vettes, Cobras and Vipers are legal. Weight and PP additions will be added weekly to equalize the field.

Race day would be Sunday night as everyone is recovering and relaxing from the weekend.

What do you think? Any ideas?

Could be interesting. There's been a Spec Miata series based off the same principle of using existing series that went well. One issue I see is that there is already a GRM series running on Sunday nights. What type of race format were you thinking? Duration of the race, tire/fuel wear (Y or N), track types, etc.

I am guessing you are talking about GT6.

My concern would be that the older cars would be outclassed by the newer ones (which seems to be the trend, even with full tuning). Also, balancing with weight and PP penalties during the series has had mixed results. The main issue is a sort of "tipping point" where someone who is winning gets handicapped into oblivion (making racing no fun at all).

The best thing you could do (and probably the most difficult aspect of creating new race series) is test a bunch of cars and see what trends you see. If you can make a good pass at equalizing the cars at the start, that helps a lot. (At least our group is a cleaver and competitive bunch of racers, they WILL find the ringers!)

We are running a Muscle Car series (stock suspension, PP equalized) in GT6 now and it is working out pretty well but we still have at least a few cars that are clearly a bit faster then others (and a few that are clearly slower) despite having the same PP. Torque curves seem to have a lot to do with this.

Makes for great visuals / pics either way though.

Thanks for the input guys!

I have no intention competing with you guys. You have a good thing going and don't want to disrupt that. I love running with you guys and now that racing season is over I'm going to jump in the next series.

I love the tuning aspect of racing and being a former competitor in that series I would love to try an emulate it. Your idea of testing is a good one. I'll set a baseline and go from there.

Air- Why didn't the weight/PP penalties work? I blame Dean! LOL! Whatever it is it's his fault!

Well... clearly the "Dean" factor.

The PP/weight penalties do work but the trend we saw was that a faster driver (let's just say it: Spool) would run away with the first few races (you know, because he is faster). You don't want the handicaps to ramp too quickly, so he can overcome them for a few races, starts to drop down, but still does good, then the HC becomes too much. Still good though, he now finishes low, but not near the last. This just traps him into the overburdened HC, makes the racing less fun and give little reason for him to continue to compete. It can also encourage him to enter a race and just sit on the side to get a last place to help reset his HC a bit (of course though, he would have to finish last as many times as he won).

That was using a totally balance and weighted HC. E.g. max HC for each race was (for example) 10. Winner would get -10, last place would get +10, all others would be equally spread between that (finish in the middle = 0).

As I remember when we used that, we allowed positive HC to go above the original PP level, which also had us run into PP limits on some cars.

There may be some improvements to be made on how the HC ramps. I know the points spread in real races tend to be rather different then we normally use. Real race series tend to give a LOT of points to the first few places, and little or nothing to later finishers (maybe there is a lesson there also).

If you can figure out a HC / Points system that provides for good and competitive racing that could be VERY useful. We certainly don't want to KEEP fast drivers from winning, just reduced the dominating (which tends to make it more interesting for everyone).

In another series I've raced in with Razor70, he keeps a running PP on everycar raced basede on his and others performance. These are only GT/LM cars but that seems to work pretty well. One week my GT1 Z06 would be 635PP and the next week would be 633PP for example. This is based on finishing performance and updates from PSN. That is a huge amount of work. Making and constantly updating a database of vehicles.