November 12 workshop and rule change suggestions

[bsclywilly]

Time Attack workshop will be held before the awards banquet on November 12 at the same location:

Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel & Suites
600 Highway 7 East (at Highways 404 & 7)
Richmond Hill, Ontario L4B 1B2 Canada
Telephone: (905) 881-2121 Fax: (905) 881-7841
Reservations: 1-800-668-0101

Directions can be found at:

http://www.sheratonparkway.com/driving/

Times TBA.

Bill and others,
Since some of the new guys out this year don't know who I am since I've had work commitments all summer, I'll introduce myself. I'm one of the representatives of the Car Classification Committee that collects, analyses, and forms the rule suggestions to the rest of the OTA committee made up of club representatives. I also perform all the rule book editing for the last few years. Consider me the chairman of the CCC so I will respond on behalf of the CCC which is also known as the 'rules committee'.

Some of this may have been mentioned in previous posts, but I will iterate again. The forums are a great place to breed discussion and thoughts about rule change suggestions but it doesn't go so far as to actually make the suggestion to our group which must then review, re-analyse, and actually put the concise and accurate wording together that makes it in to the rule book. Part of the reason being, is that many suggestions that get started on the forums need to be thought through very thoroughly, otherwise there is the risk that if the rule doesn't make good sense after the fact, or that it doesn't achieve what we are aiming for, the stability of our ruleset is negatively affected. So on behalf of the CCC, we ask that after getting some feedback on these forums for some rule change ideas, please send to us your suggestion, with as much supporting evidence and any analysis results that you can (e.g. lap time differences from a tire test you did, what competitors scoring would have resulted in previous years with your new method, etc.)

You can imagine how time consuming and perhaps mind-numbing our job would be if we had to go through 28 pages of thoughts and suggestions and consider each idea. We realize that many ideas and suggestions do get refined through discussion so if you came up with the idea, send it over once it's been well thought out. Our email is in the rule book on the first page of contacts (next to my name, William Chan). I won't write it down here because I think it's important (just a little bit) to have the rule book in hand for reference when suggesting new rules.

A good place to do a sanity check for new rule suggestions is to read through our guiding principles in section 1. A second requirement when it comes to classification and scoring is that there needs to be a good understanding of how our system works. I feel like I've explained it countless numbers of times in past years' posts (which, understandably, may be hard to find at this point) but everywhere I find examples from both new members and old that lack some of the fundamental understanding of how a car is classified and scored, fundamental assumptions that need to be considered, fundamentals in our scoring and classifcation philosophy that can't be changed (unless we throw out the whole book!).

In the end though, I have to say that there are not many series' in the world that have a more fair scoring and classification structure than ours is currently. It has gotten to be this way through fine tweaking and adjustments since 2006. Few rulesets can claim that a heavily modified civic can be classed and scored competitively with a stock Z06, or that we can predict lap times for a 550hp AWD monster all the way down to a sub 100hp FWD car. Of course nothing is perfect and some changes are on order for this year, but with the exception of a few anomalies (exceptional drivers or misclassified cars), our record books speak for themselves in aligning with our scoring method to a very good degree. We don't want to be overhauling things at this point!

That being said, we hold an annual workshop before the CASC-OR banquet coming up on November 12. I plan to prepare something that will hopefully debunk some myths and misunderstandings of PAX scoring, how we classify cars, and what exactly is a 'linear classification system'. We'll go over the pros and cons of a couple different suggestions that have been made. We'll bring up our list of action items (what rule changes and classifications changes we plan to investigate - there aren't that many at the moment, FYI). And most importatnly we'll try to discuss it with the attendees to get your feedback. Notes from the meeting wil be posted after on this forum. I will also post the list of changes being considered prior to that date.

Finally, I just want to add, that those of us on the CCC are all actively looking for ways to improve the series so if we read something on the forums that peak our interest we'll discuss that too without it being a formal submital from a competitor. BUT, when threads get so large and off topic from it's original subject header, it becomes impossible for us to follow the thought process that you guys bring up. I'm talking about some forum ettiquette here - please try to stay on topic! Don't post new and unrelated ideas in a thread just because it happens to be popular. You never know, I have often had to refer to threads as old as 2005 to see what sort of decisions or ideas were brought up then. If I came across a thread with 28 pages, there is no way in hell that i'm going to even try to get any good information from it a year down the road, let alone a month.

Regards,

[bsclywilly]

place holder

[Alloy GT]

Hi Will! And thanks for your post: well thought out indeed. I would add, that a subject of "BT PAX and Car Classification" is enormously broad. As much as the former is very specific, the latter is very open ended. Perhaps that explains the overall breadth of the posts. Especially, given lack of any parameters wrt what could be considered vs not. Anyhow, you will certainly be recieving my input and i thank you for this opportunity! I would love to attend the meeting, but that would mean flying in from Alberta, so the likelyhood of this happening is close to NIL, unfortunately. But, if you wished to discuss my submission, i would be more than happy to do a conf call at your convenience. Cheers, Bill