Re: Tech Escalation...
The business model is to penalize the slowest cars, and to make the faster-slow cars faster.
If you are too damned slow and they deem you to be in the way of the fast cars, they pull you off track "in the interest of your own safety".
If you are too fast for the slow class (Like you win Class C), you get bumped up to B and are told to make your car faster and you will be permitted budget leeway to make go-fast changes to your car.
If you are too fast for B (like you win Class B) ^^^ same story.
In fact, every race you do not win you are encouraged to make changes to your car to make it go faster through the "post race residual value" process.
If you are too fast for A (like you win Class A) you are rewarded with $. Win a second time, you are rewarded with $. Third time, you are rewarded with $, etc etc. Once upon a time, there were occasional lap penalties for overall winners. This has fallen away because some higher ups don't want to penalize people "just because they got it right" (not my words).
Sure, a talking head has said a time or two at an all-call meeting that this is "Amateur Endurance Racing" and that there are no professional scouts at the event and if you want to be a go-fast douche, you should go elsewhere (I'm paraphrasing). This is just lippus flappus. In the current model, this is not encouraged by the way the series is set up. If you win, you are free to win again and again and you must "self-graduate" . Unless you are in a slow-fast car, in which case you are forced to graduate and invest $ to get faster or invest a bunch of $ to buy another slow car to build into a fast-slow car until IT wins and is forced to graduate.
The series is 100% set up (or evolved) to promote speed creep and to have a bunching of faster cars at the upper end of the speed spectrum.
On the surface, it doesn't seem like it is supposed to be that way.
The series attracts new participants by highlighting the slowness and crappiness and general hopelessness of the series and magnifies the hilarity that ensures. New participants often bring what they see highlighted in the official publicity: Crap. When newbies arrive to their first event, they are faced with a dramatic reality check. They are either getting their doors blown off or they are watching 70% of the field out there racing while they are wrenching their asses off on a $500 minimally-prepped car. Some are even thinking, "Hey! We even CHEATED on the $500 budget and and we're STILL getting our doors blown off!"
That first race weekend quickly separates the wheat from the chaff that somehow slipped through after the first weeding-out process, which was the whole Form a team, start building a car, find team members to replace those who quit mid-build, finish building the car, and pay $1380 weeks in advance.
It truly takes a special breed to want to punish yourself a second time, or to admit to yourself that you totally got it wrong this first time and you're going to go out and give it another try (but first you need to find still MORE new team members because those second-tier replacements you had aren't coming back for another go).
And what do you think the focus is on for that second time team leader and the 3rd tier driver's she/he has had to recruit? Going faster. (We vets all know it should be "just make it run and finish" but that not that second time team leader)
The archetypal newbie-team is dwindling. Those newbies who are easily drawn to the series Hilarious Crap premise are already here, and it takes more effort to attract the new naive meat out there. And it is even harder to keep that new meat who has lost some of its naivete. So what you end up getting is seasoned / veteran meat from other series who already know how to drive, "cheat fast", and who just want to drive fast in a different setting and/or get more seat time.
The ball is rolling, if it hasn't already reached terminal velocity, it is damned near. There's nobody who is going to jump in the way to try to slow it down or change its direction. Lemons is what it is. Until it changes its mass through erosion, or something bigger comes along and crashes into it, it will just keep rolling along as it is. It's physics.
There were maybe some tweeks that could have taken place before it got this big, or perhaps some of the things that were in place previously that should not have been withdrawn or allowed to fall by the wayside, but that's all water under the bridge. Live in the now.
It's now, Nut Up or Shut Up.
"It's a goddamn race"
I don't disagree. This does, however, involve the implication that you're going to get faster and start winning. I think the various teammates/car we've raced are forever at the slightly quicker end of B, and going to stay there. I don't see a win in the future, and that's OK. There is someone to race with on every lap. We usually finish in the top half of the standings, and that means a lot of rich guys driving sports cars got outraced by my German Tank. This is satisfying. Is that an odd worldview?
#289 1984 Corvette Z51 #124 1984 944 #110 2002 Passat
Gone but not forgotten, #427-Hong Kong Cavaliers Benz S500
IOE (Humber!) Hell on Wheels (Jaguar)