I have been part of the series since Thunderhill 07, and what has been gnawing at me time and time again as the rules are updated and updated is very simple:
A Lemons car can no longer be reasonably built in your driveway with a sawzall and cordless drill.
We are at a point now that without highly specialized skills and equipment, a decent shop with decent tools, and/or a lot of money putting together a Lemons car - competitive or not - is unattainable.
AND, there's no two ways about it, these rules have increased the cost of building a car from scratch. There's simply more stuff to buy. If you're a new driver the cost of the stuff you wear to sit in the car is daunting. This is not such a big deal really, but it is going to have one very negative side effect - people are much, much less likely to bring odd ball unreliable cars.
If I've put $4500 in prep into a car, I"m not going to choose a Renault Fuego. It's going to fail, and with it my investment. 'throw away' cars will become a thing of 'way back when' stories, which it too bad. It may be necessary, but it's too bad. Because there's two Fuegos in Portland for $999.... just sayin....
Nick (and Jay if he keeps up with this) - you guys are doing a hell of a job trying to hold this thing together here. We all recognize you guys started this as a whim and it's blown up in your faces. I hope everyone knows that while we all go to three races at most, you guys do this all over the country 10 (?) times a year, and have to deal with planning it not just building a car and showing up to race. But the fears of this turning into an over-regulated spec-ish race are real to us racers, and probably pretty founded based on what has happened to other popular race series in the past.
I guess my point is this - these latest rules are neither unreasonable nor uncalled for. It does not seem to me any of the rule changes have been overwhelming. But, taken as a whole over a fairly short period of time (2ish years), this has gone from a hack it together in your driveway as best you can for the fun of it race, to a very, very serious undertaking. While I'm still playing with the idea of building a third Lemons car, I don't think building the next one will be near as much fun as the last two have been because I'll be too worried about messing up my $500 car. And that doesn't make any sense.