Steve Grosekemper wrote:Well kids,
Let's gather around the fire and let Ol' Man Tweed tell you how it was back in the day...
Tom?
Yes, I am getting to be older than dirt, and was involved way back in the beginning of the BRI, which was actually still in this century (2002, to be exact). There was some grumbling by the drivers of the slower classes of cars about TTOD being the only award at an event, since they had little opportunity to win that honor. Yes, you could win your class, but there was no way to judge how the driver in a lower class would have done against a higher class driver if the car was taken out of the equation. Those of us who also autocrossed with SCCA knew that they had developed a theoretical performance index to do just that over the years called "PAX." It is the SCCA’s system for comparing the performance of cars from different classes against each other, and is applied at every event to the raw times in order to yield a listing of "indexed" times, the winner of which is considered to be as prestigious as the TTOD driver.
If you haven't already discovered it, there is a story on the PCA-SDR website explaining the genesis and evolution of the BRI:
http://pcasdr.org/pcasdr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/StoryOfBRI.pdfBasically, it started with Carl Scragg using data of SDR AX results collected by Chris Benbow and myself to yield the first BRI index, and was revised and expanded to the Time Trial series from there. The creation of the "Polished Dolphin" trophy is as stated by Gary Burch above, although I believe it might have been based on a comment by Curt Anderson, not Dan Andrews, though they were good friends and shared the same attitude about the imprecise nature of the BRI award, resulting in the quite male-centric and slightly demeaning nickname.
Nevertheless, I was happy to win the award more than my share of times over the years, and receive a memorial of that in the form of a drawing by Gary of me driving my old 1967 911S and clutching the trophy, which became my current avatar.
TT