To each his own. I’m not going to sit here and try and put autocrossing and Chumpcar on a scale to weigh it versus someone who wants their car to look good and handle better on the street. Bottom line, even if you’re national A-stock SCCA Solo II champ, you’re still just a guy racing around a parking lot making no money off it. Chances are Jenson Button, Sebastian Vettel, and Lewis Hamilton aren’t in your Rolodex just because you’re a Solo II champ or won a Lemons race.
Look, we get it, you want to promote motorsports. I know you in person from various SCCA events and know you’re a good guy who would always help out if someone had questions at an event or needed some help. You even went so far as providing a loaner car to the autocross driving school before. The whole mocking people who aren’t into motorsports thing is a pretty terrible method for drawing in new people though. Besides that, if I didn’t know you or the WNY region SSCA guys I’d be expecting to show up and have to deal with a bunch of assholes who look down on anyone who isn’t 100% committed to being the next parking lot king, something I know for a fact isn’t the case with anyone regularly involved with WNY SCCA.
So dial it back a bit, get some new drivers to come out and have a fun Sunday autocrossing with a great group of people, and maybe WNY SCCA wouldn’t be stuck at average of 45 cars per local event.
True, however I just won $400 from Honda and 3 tires from Hoosier(~$900) so contingencies definately help fund the recreational racer. And you’ll pretty much go nowhere in motorsports in general because we were all born in the wrong country where motorsports over here are pretty much a joke.
I think Jeremy pushes so hard here because this is place where people are coming out and saying that they are into cars. Well, some people like to meet up and go to car shows and that’s their thing. However, being an enthusiast I’ve done the same exact thing. Meet up, stare at cars, go for a cruise, talk about how much I push my car while trying not to kill someone on public roads while looking for cops, etc. Then I found sanctioned racing and realized it’s such a beautiful thing. Perfect environments, safe, instruction if wanted, and I can push and learn new skills. Is there a trade off considering the time and money? For sure. Some of you have done a few types of sanctioned racing and have rationalized weather or not it is worth it to you. Kudos to you (I’m not being sarcastic here). You have at least tried and made an educated decision on weather or not it’s worth your time. But so many have not done that. And there’s definately some here who will find out that it is for them, and will look back at their siqqqqq street skills and laugh at themselves and be proud of where they went with their auto-enthusiasm. It’s all about changing even one persons mind. I can think of a younger kid in our region who rolled with kids street racing and we got him into autocrossing and now he never gets in trouble on the street, and has learned a useful skill set for driving. I dunno, I guess I’m trying to say for some of us the pros of sanctioned racing outweigh the cons tenfold.
If the pinnacle of amateur racing in name dropping then go to the Easter weekend ChumpCar race and talk to a F1 car driver that has raced that event the last two years.
I’d be flattered if people cared about me that much. If they do, then they have deeper issues than not wanting to drive their car fast.
Like it or not, you’re the face of WNY SCCA on here. Since far more newbies sign up here than they do over at the WNY SCCA forum I’m just suggesting that if you want to be the unofficial SCCA recruiter try not to throw “you’re a bunch of posers” out there so much. If it’s that hard maybe see if someone with a little more PR friendly online persona wants to handle cross posting web promotion. Anyone who’s been to an event knows you’re a great guy, but if I only ever read these posts I’d probably have a much different opinion of you.
Bottom line, I want to see the WNY Solo program get back to the days of 100+ car events and a healthy turnover in the novice class because I feel I owe WNY SCCA for opening my eyes to entry level motorsports. I hate seeing these threads turn into a fight between the cruising crowd and the motorsports crowd because that’s the exact opposite of what the region needs.
Without autocrossing I doubt I would have jumped into the UBRF track day at TMP, and without track days I really doubt I’d be considering jumping into lemons/chump car. A strong local SCCA region will help bring others into that. I’m not saying it’s a progression, just that Solo is by far the cheapest/easiest way to take that step beyond driving a little recklessly on the street. There’s really nothing else where you can take your daily driver, show up with no prep beyond having it in shape that would pass NYS inspection, with nothing but sunblock and some tape and run in a timed event.
I’d love to come out to this but working and then on vacation.
I was pumped when i saw the AutoX thread and my car is running like a champ.
boo.
Also, I can’t remember.
Is it I can’t run if I don’t have a rollbar or is it IF i have a rollbar I can run IF it meets the regs and can run without one regardless.
c’mon, I’ve been nice in all my threads this year, and this one has the most activity.
If it was stock, running in stock class, then you can run how it came stock (no roll bar, factory roll bar, or aftermarket roll bar that meets safety requirements)
But with the V8, I am not sure what class you are in now without committing some time going through the rule book:
