by kary on Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:04 pm
I have often thought about building an auto-x car such as a 550 spyder replica with a 6 cylinder engine that would be fun to drive, light wieght and very competitive at auto-x's. I enjoy auto-x and would like to have a car that is more nimble than most street Porsche's would ever be. I would really like to have a 908/3 but that is not likely to ever happen, but boy what fun that car would be in an auto-x!
Unfortunately, the PCA rules specify that the car entered must have a Porsche motor and a chasis thus ruling out this thought. I do not see what I would like to do to be any different than others in the club wanting to run Ferrari's, Lambo's, Audi', BMW's, or any other type of car except that I am trying to stay within the Porsche family and keep it affordable.
Some have told me if I want to build such a car that I should just join SCCA. Well, one reason that I do not do it is the friends that I have made over the past 8 years and the fact that I am not really interested in running three laps for an event. I enjoy the quality of our events, the track time (both auto-x and time trail) and do not want that to change. If we were to exclude X cars from the last auto-x we would have gained back 44 laps at around 100 seconds a lp on average. Is that significant, I willnot debate that, but I will say some cars probably should not belong there. So let's say that we extended the rules to something like what has been proposed in this and other threads. It seems to me that everyone will be wanting to bring their kit cars, race cars, and family cars to auto-x events. What would happen to the club events? Wold we suddenly have an influx of 20 X cars, 25 X cars, 30 X cars that are members and fell they have the right to run these non-Porsche cars?
I think over time we will get into trouble with technical inspections, safety of cars and the fitness of these cars to run more strenuous laps, we might get into trouble with our insurance (?), we might displace members who really want to run Porsche's. We end up putting a great burden on our chair people to make decisions that are really not necessary which only adds further stress to volunteers that dedicate much time and effort to make our events fun and profitable for our club.
I have seen our club evolve rules, particularly in auto-x that I do not always agree with and others fully agree with. Things like charging $20 more if you do not register ahead of time, loss of all timed laps for not corner working, or decisions about allowing X cars in or not seem to indicate that we have an over attendance issue. When we have to try and pump through more than 130 cars in a day for auto-x it is very difficult to do well and keep the quality fo the event high. This adds more stress to our volunteers. These measures have not slowed the participation, yet we are asking for some sort of allowance for non-Porsche cars which only contributes to this issue. We have had instructor days and fun auto-x days every year to accommodate peoples desire to run these non-Porsche X cars. Where does this end?
In my opinion, this is a Porsche club. Making specific rules to allow non-Porsche cars in auto-x will only hurt our ability to deliver a quality set of events where participation is already high and will be hindered by too many participates. Time Trial is a whole other discussion because of the lower participation levels, but has a serious safety aspect to it that I for one do not want to enter into our time trial events. We do not have good technical inspection for time trail non-Porsche cars and do not necessarily know those drivers. The risks are high for those non-Porsche dirvers/cars and even higher to the Porsche drivers/cars since we do not always know who is on the track with us. Sorry for the off track discussion but maybe we can discuss Time Trial non-Porche particpation in another thread.
So I still ask why do we really need to accommodate X cars? There are consequences to our events if we try and do this.