Participation numbers

[ASGTO]

Originally Posted by SedanMan

I don't have a dog in this fight so I'm not taking sides with anyone but from a fairness or scientific point of view it's not really accurate to draw conclusions about the performance of 2 different cars based on the car and DRIVER combinations. If you want to compare the potential of an AS car and a T2 car then you really need to take the drivers out of the equation and have the same driver drive both (at the same track on the same day). Track personality, weather, track surface condition (is there oil or dirt on the track from the last race group?) all skew the relative difference between tracks and even race dates at the same track.

In this case the Brannon/Baten comparison would have been more relevant if they could have switched cars and THEN compare the relative lap times. And not at different tracks, in different years. Preferably back to back on the same day at the same track. It's always possible that the same driver could be faster in both cars which would highlight the drivers more than the cars. For example, one driver might be smoother and the other driver thinks they drive the car hard but they overdrive the car, pushing it too deep into corners and driving it loose off. It seems fast to the driver, but the stopwatch says it's actually slower. If you feed those perceptions to the CRB then is the feedback really accurate or relevant? My point is that you really need to swap cars and drivers to get a better picture of which CAR is faster, or has more potential.

But that's what's difficult about 'handicapping' in motorsports. My hat goes off to the tech committees that try and level the playing field among many different manufacturers, chassis, engines, front/rear drive layouts, transmissions, gear ratios, aero packages, wheel sizes, etc. There are a few examples of this in Pro racing and it finds its way into the SCCA classes too. To that end I think AS has less platforms to try and equalize than T2 does but the arguments and negotiations for any camp to get concessions from the tech committees are still there.

Of course all this is theoretical and in practice is pretty difficult to do. But just to highlight the point I'll give you one example. In the 2007 SCCA Heartland Park Runoffs we were about 3/4 of the way through the race when the SpeedTV announcer said that I had just posted the fastest lap of the race. However, on track I was behind Heinricy, Sloe, and McDermid. So how was that possible? Well, I had clean track in front of me and they were all racing for position, corner after corner, lap after lap. So technically since at the end of the race McDermid's fastest race lap was slower than mine he could have argued to the CRB that a 3rd Gen GM Fbody was faster than his '05 Ford Mustang. But if we traded cars on the same day at the same track under clear track conditions I'm sure he'd kick my butt! Car, or driver??? (As a side note, Wheeler's fastest lap time was almost 2 seconds a lap faster than mine, so come to think of it I think those damn Firebirds need to be slowed WAY down!!! haha)

All I want to leave people with is the reminder that you can overdo the 'stats' and irrelevant comparisons. Make the testing more scientific and the results will be much more relevant.

After reading thru this for a third time..........I see that you totally ignored the hard data that you highly recommended using: like the SCCA official race results and lap times. Between the top T2 cars in the country and the top AS cars in the country (that came and raced). As well as the well prepped Baten car on the same track would have been in 3rd in AS at the 2009 Runoffs whilst running in the T2 legal trim. Competitive???

[SedanMan]

Originally Posted by ASGTO

After reading thru this for a third time..........I see that you totally ignored the hard data that you highly recommended using: like the SCCA official race results and lap times. Between the top T2 cars in the country and the top AS cars in the country (that came and raced). As well as the well prepped Baten car on the same track would have been in 3rd in AS at the 2009 Runoffs whilst running in the T2 legal trim. Competitive???

Chris, I think you missed my point. I never said to use "SCCA official race results and lap times". I used an example of such to illustrate that you can NOT necessarily use that kind of data to make inferences about relative car potentials. If you used that kind of data from the '07 Runoffs race then one would infer that either Andy couldn't drive or his car wasn't as fast as the other top AS cars were that day given that Wheeler's fastest race lap was 2 seconds a lap faster than Andy's fastest race lap. Should we give Andy performance adjustments to close the gap between him and Wheeler? Obviously he can drive and his car is as fast or faster than the other top AS cars. So my point was that looking at lap times in that case didn't prove a thing about car potential and that you couldn't use those lap times to make weight adjustments, for example.

When Heinricy drove your car it wasn't in its current configuration, right? So it really doesn't have anything to do with current weight adjustments, although the back to back driver comparison was a good thing.......at that time.

Whether one driver is a test driver for Formula 1 cars or AS cars doesn't have anything to do with back to back driver testing of 2 different cars to compare the cars' relative speeds. My commentary was on the method, not the resume of one particular driver. Again, irrelevant.

[However, it goes without saying that the cars need to be in relatively good/similar prep and the drivers both need to be pretty good. For example, in the back to back comparison you wouldn't compare one car on sticker A compound tires and the other car on old used tires.]

Controlled test conditions (I think you call them "private") are more relevant when it comes to comparing one car's potential to another, especially when you include A-B-A driver comparisons of the cars. (I've never heard of drivers trading cars in the middle of an AS race.) But I think what the SCCA has a difficult time evaluating is how those 2 cars would compare against the rest of the field. My guess is that's why they like to look at race results.

But back to my point and the point of this thread that I was commenting on.....

I'll state my original point again if it wasn't clear. If you want to make a true comparison between how fast 2 different cars are then it's best to compare the same cars, on the same day, at the same track, with 2 different drivers driving both cars. If you don't trade drivers then all you really end up with is data on driver/car combinations, not on the cars themselves.

Peace.

[ASGTO]

Originally Posted by SedanMan

Chris, I think you missed my point. I never said to use "SCCA official race results and lap times". I used an example of such to illustrate that you can NOT necessarily use that kind of data to make inferences about relative car potentials. If you used that kind of data from the '07 Runoffs race then one would infer that either Andy couldn't drive or his car wasn't as fast as the other top AS cars were that day given that Wheeler's fastest race lap was 2 seconds a lap faster than Andy's fastest race lap. Should we give Andy performance adjustments to close the gap between him and Wheeler? Obviously he can drive and his car is as fast or faster than the other top AS cars. So my point was that looking at lap times in that case didn't prove a thing about car potential and that you couldn't use those lap times to make weight adjustments, for example.

When Heinricy drove your car it wasn't in its current configuration, right? So it really doesn't have anything to do with current weight adjustments, although the back to back driver comparison was a good thing.......at that time. Correct but that was a driver swap with same car, same set up, same day, same track.

Whether one driver is a test driver for Formula 1 cars or AS cars doesn't have anything to do with back to back driver testing of 2 different cars to compare the cars' relative speeds. My commentary was on the method, not the resume of one particular driver. Again, irrelevant.

[However, it goes without saying that the cars need to be in relatively good/similar prep and the drivers both need to be pretty good. For example, in the back to back comparison you wouldn't compare one car on sticker A compound tires and the other car on old used tires.] I agree and my point on this was that Baten is a top driver with a top prepped car running fast ASedan times in a T2 prepped car as recently as 2009.

Controlled test conditions (I think you call them "private") are more relevant when it comes to comparing one car's potential to another, especially when you include A-B-A driver comparisons of the cars. (I've never heard of drivers trading cars in the middle of an AS race.) But I think what the SCCA has a difficult time evaluating is how those 2 cars would compare against the rest of the field. My guess is that's why they like to look at race results.
Private testing is great and I have done a bunch of it as well as the rest of you have but you can't expect to get help from the SCCA based on that alone because it is to easy to skew the data and facts to best suit the one private testing.

But back to my point and the point of this thread that I was commenting on.....

I'll state my original point again if it wasn't clear. If you want to make a true comparison between how fast 2 different cars are then it's best to compare the same cars, on the same day, at the same track, with 2 different drivers driving both cars. If you don't trade drivers then all you really end up with is data on driver/car combinations, not on the cars themselves.

Peace.

That is all well and good but my point is that Baten would have without a doubt finished third had he entered his T2 car as it was in American Sedan in 2009. Thus one can not blatently say that the T2 Fbody in American Sedan with the AS rules applied is not competitive. It is rediculous.

[ASGTO]

Here is the 2009 T2 lap chart. Baten's car was #98.


Chart T2
Sanction No. IDC-09-S
Road America
4.0 Mile Road Course Friday September 25, 2009
Laps
1 35 35 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 35 35 35 35
2 4 4 35 35 35 35 35 2 2 2 2 2 2
3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 35 35 98 98 86 86
4 98 98 98 98 98 98 98 98 98 86 86 76
5 86 86 86 86 86 86 86 86 86 76 76 76 98

Looks pretty consistant to.