One thought I’ve had, given how hard it is to leave home for a long weekend, is to find a way to do more races at Laguna Seca and Infineon (which are only about 90 minutes from home), and fewer at Thunderhill (which is about 3 hours from home.)

Only way to do that is to skip the SCCA races at Thunderhill, and instead, do some NASA races at Laguna and Sears. I’m a long-time SCCA guy (been a member for over 19 years!) and really consider the SCCA to be my club, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t partake a little bit in the competition.

In NASA, my car would be legal for two classes:

• PTC: the Performance Touring classes have a “base class” for every car ever made, and then you add up points for each modification. In my case, I gain 40 points, which moves me from my base class of PTD up two classes to PTB … but with only one point less, I could run in PTC. To “give back” that one point, I’ll either remove my strut tower bar (which is worth one point), or I’ll add some weight. If I run with a minimum weight of 2849 instead of the SCCA ITR weight of 2800, I can use the “alternate method” of calculating points for weight.
• GTS2: the GTS Challenge classes are for German cars, and pretty much anything is legal; cars are classed simply by power-to-weight ratios. In my case, based on my latest dyno results, if I run with a minimum weight of 2835 (vs 2800 in ITR), then I’ll be right at the top of the power-to-weight range in GTS2.

The problem is that here in the Northern California area, there are very few competitors in either of those classes — but there are more in PTC than GTS2. So, I’ll probably race in PTC. Both classes race in the same race group on Nasa weekends, so it doesn’t really much matter.

The goal, of course, since I’m an SCCA guy, would be to run the car as-is in NASA. Therefore, I wouldn’t expect to be competitive .. one should only expect to be competitive under the ruleset that a race car was really built towards. I wouldn’t want to jeopardize my competitiveness in ITR. With that in mind, pretty much the only changes (other than weight or the strut bar) that I’d have to make to the car is that I’d need to run Nasa decals in place of the SCCA decals. I’d also have to get a NASA logbook for the car, and of course, join NASA and get a racing license!

So we might try that in 2008. We’ll see!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under NASA, SCCA, Schedule.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.