So, I just stumbled across this:
https://cdn.connectsites.net/user_files/scca/downloads/000/074/149/seb_12_31_24mt.pdf
Is this actually happening?!?
If so, I might be tempted to hold off on drastically modifying my newly acquired NC2.
They are trying to get ahead of the sunset rule, which will render the current frontrunners ineligible
In reply to Andy Hollis :
Excuse my ignorance, but what is the sunset rule?
And does that mean these changes are actually happening?
It's where 30 year old cars are no longer eligible for national events. It applies for the street category. The NBs are getting close to that age so time to refresh the class.
...Or create a 'because Miata' rule exception.
In reply to bmw88rider :
It's all coming together now.
I had no idea such a rule existed.
I just did a search, and sure enough:
"A car will remain eligible for National events through the end of the 30th calendar year after the manufacturer-designated model year of the car. This eligibility limitation applies only to the Street classes."
That makes all the sense in the world. I used to have a 1999 Sport. They're getting almost impossible to find these days. To find mine I had to scour Craigslist ads from the entire country and fly from Colorado to Florida to buy a heavily sun-faded/clear-coat peeling, flat-spotted beater. It makes sense that at a certain point, it might be time to move on when older "cars to have" start getting tough to find.
I suppose it also makes sense to start swapping the class a few years early, to revamp the class before phasing out the old cars.
I might just leave my NC2 alone and run it in ES next year, assuming this provision goes forward.
Driven5 said:...Or create a 'because Miata' rule exception.
Thinking about this from my own selfish/self-interested point of view: if the NC replaces the 1999 NB Sport as the "car to have", I believe the spirit of "because Miata" still exists. 
I'm completely ignoring the existence of the 2003 MR2 Spyder with this train of thought.
Looking back at some older Nats results, the last time most of these cars were grouped together, there didn't appear to be a "car to have". It looks like the NC, 1st gen FR-S/BRZ, RX-8 and 350Z were all pretty competitive:
https://cdn.connectsites.net/user_files/scca/downloads/000/009/326/2015_Tire_Rack_SCCA_Solo_Nationals_Final_Results.pdf?1444922039
It looked like a pretty fun class to run in, before the ND came in and outpaced everything by a substantial margin.
So if you're a local competitor you can run the car forever.
Here's the thing I find ironic about SCCA; 95% of members will never do a national event. Yet the SCCA is hyper focused on this.
Why do the rules makers give a damn how hard the car owner had to work to find/maintain etc a 30yr old car?
Guess that's why the rules book is hundreds of pages just for people to drive around cones one at a time :)
In reply to kevlarcorolla :
In principle, I agree. I don't think older cars should automatically be phased out, based on age alone.
With that said, it's getting pretty difficult to find a clean, running 1999 NB Sport or 2003 MR2 Spyder to be competitive in ES. With these potential rule changes, it would open up the class to the 1st gen Twins, NC Miata, RX-8 and 350Z/370Z- all of which are fairly easy to locate, they're all pretty affordable and have large aftermarkets. All of those cars are currently buried in C-Street, which has pretty much become a Spec ND class- which, that's great if you have an ND2/3, but that really limits the field of competition in CS. In terms of driving participation, sure, Mazda has made a decent number of ND2/3's, but those production numbers are dwarfed by the availability (and lower prices) of the Twins/NC/RX-8/Z cars.
While it might not be great for folks that are currently in ES (NB/MR2 Spyder), it would open up a ton of potential for new competition in popular, affordable cars. I've always thought of ES as an entry level Street class, at least from a cost perspective. These days the NC/Twins/RX-8/350Z are seemingly priced similarly to what a good NB or MR2 Spyder would cost.
I also think of the Street classes being more geared towards newer cars that people are less likely to extensively modify and the Street Touring/Prepared classes are more geared towards older cars that people are more likely to build. With the changes to Street Touring, I wonder if the SCCA is banking on NB's and MR2 Spyder's going to play in the new CST class. Looking at older STR results (prior to the ND), they (NB's & MR2's) were actually fairly competitive in the old STR class (which is similar to the new CST class).
This switch makes sense to me.
As someone who bought an MR2 Spyder to go run in ES two years, I'm pretty bummed to see that, even if it isn't immediately made illegal, it'll likely get wiped out by the newer cars. At a local level, I don't think there'll be too many threats in the newer cars, but I'm sure PAX will take a hit, which will still make them less competitive.
kevlarcorolla said:Why do the rules makers give a damn how hard the car owner had to work to find/maintain etc a 30yr old car?
Sometimes you have to save people from themselves.
That said this proposal is one of the few situations I can think of that's worse than current ES. Move from a 30 year old car with no parts left but at least it's fairly reliable, to a fifteen year old car that's wildly unreliable and parts are starting to get scarce.
dps214 said:kevlarcorolla said:Why do the rules makers give a damn how hard the car owner had to work to find/maintain etc a 30yr old car?
Sometimes you have to save people from themselves.
That said this proposal is one of the few situations I can think of that's worse than current ES. Move from a 30 year old car with no parts left but at least it's fairly reliable, to a fifteen year old car that's wildly unreliable and parts are starting to get scarce.
Am I missing something here? Are you talking about the RX-8?
Of the 4 cars that appear to be competitive with each other, ignoring the RX-8, the NC's are considered to be fairly reliable and I haven't noticed any real shortage of parts. The Twins have questionable reliability (I would think they should be fine for dodging cones), but have a giant aftermarket and seemingly no real shortage of parts that I'm aware of. The 350Z/370Z at least have stout powertrains and with so much chassis sharing between Nissan/Infinity, there appears to be a seemingly never-ending supply of parts available, unless I'm missing something?
Yes, the RX8, the fairly clear best car of the proposed additions and by far and away the most unreliable.
If you look more closely at the results, only a few people ever really figured out the NC and by their own accounts the cars still drove terrible, just fairly fast. Even in the results posted above, there's one NC near the top of the results (the one that had it figured out) and absolutely no others in the trophies. And for reference the FRSes in those results are all all TRD package cars which aren't included in this proposal.
dps214 said:Yes, the RX8, the fairly clear best car of the proposed additions and by far and away the most unreliable.
If you look more closely at the results, only a few people ever really figured out the NC and by their own accounts the cars still drove terrible, just fairly fast. Even in the results posted above, there's one NC near the top of the results (the one that had it figured out) and absolutely no others in the trophies. And for reference the FRSes in those results are all all TRD package cars which aren't included in this proposal.
I'm not convinced that the RX-8 would be the car to have. If you look closely at the results, out of a field of 61 cars, there were only 3 NCs that year, with 2 of them (same car) taking 2nd and 3rd. For a field of 3 NCs, that's not bad.
One thing I noticed that Chris Harvey and Chris Fenter did with their NC was run the opposite setup that most people with an NC run- they put a larger aftermarket sway bar in the Rear, not the front:
https://www.mazdamotorsports.com/2015/03/17/solo-street-class-setup-mx-5/
https://www.scca.com/articles/2003662-arrive-and-drive
Beyond that, it looks pretty standard: double adjustable shocks, max camber. I'm sure the shocks were well dialed in.
Looking back at the previous year, the class winner was a 370Z and quite a few cars that received trophies were also 370Zs:
https://cdn.connectsites.net/user_files/scca/downloads/000/007/416/2014_Tire_Rack_SCCA_Solo_Nats_Results_.pdf?1433947931
I'm not convinced that any car would be the car to have, per se. This is my 2nd NC. I've spent some time behind the wheel of an RX-8 in the past- in my rough estimation, the RX-8 is absolutely flatter through corners and easier to control, but low-speed acceleration is nearly identical and the NC has a ~500 lbs weight advantage- that's pretty substantial.
The last time I ran in CS, I was on the opposite end of that equation- I was running an AP2 S2000 up against ND2s. The S2000 absolutely has a tighter suspension in stock form and a more top-end friendly motor (like the RX-8). Much like the RX-8, I was at a ~500 lbs weight disadvantage. The ND2's proved to have the advantage in the end, even with their disconcerting amounts of body roll.
Interesting, the NB vs Spyder show down is finally coming to an end.
Super interesting to see what car rises to the top.
kevlarcorolla said:Why do the rules makers give a damn how hard the car owner had to work to find/maintain etc a 30yr old car?
There are a couple of competitive issues that come up. If there's a perception that the 'car to have' is difficult to actually obtain then it tends to kill a class -- why enter a class when there are people already in it who have faster cars that you can't buy? This is the sort of thing that mostly matters to nationals-level drivers, but then again that's who the formal rules are really written for. If a local club wants let people run old cars in the Street class locally then no one is going to stop them.
A secondary issue is that if a car is old and rare, then the protest-based "self policing" of the class doesn't work as well. If your competitor is racing a car that you've never had an opportunity to actually see before, then how can you tell if he's changed parts that were required to remain stock? Again, this is mainly a nationals-level issue because who wants to deal with protests at local events.
I suspect it will take a lot longer for these concerns to be relevant to Miatas than it does for many other cars, but 20 years ago I remember there was a fascination with early 70s US-model TVR that was classed in a stock class. Everyone thought it would be very fast for the class, but very few people could actually find one to buy and try out.
I sold my 99 sport in November. I'm currently competing in my daily driver civic in H Street,waiting to see how the class changes settle out. I want a competitive car since that means that if I'm getting beat I know that it's me and not the car.
I'm most inclined to get an NC2/3, but the soft top manual cars aren't as common.
I might end up in E Street again, or play with a bunch of my friends in CST.
In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :
I agree with the mentality of: if I'm getting beat, I want to know the problem is me and not the car.
A few years back I ran CS in my AP2 S2000 against a good friend of mine in his ND2. He won the regional championship for the season, while I took 2nd. He consistently beat me by 2-4 tenths throughout the season. I think I beat him once the entire season, when he was having an off day and I was driving pretty well on a course that suited the S2000. We co-drove at a test and tune after the season was over, with each of us getting in about a dozen runs. Our best times were within hundredths of each other. Granted, we drove my S2000, but he owned an S2000 for about a decade and took a few trophies at Nats with it (when the S2000 was still in BS), so it's not like he wasn't intimately familiar with the car.
It was very frustrating to know that I wasn't being beaten by a better driver, I was losing because he had a better car. I considered trading my S2000 in on an ND, but I just don't fit- I can't get comfortable in the ND and it ends up hurting my right knee to drive. Otherwise, I probably would have bought one.
I had to order my NC2 from out of state for the reason you describe- I wanted a soft top 6MT car with the LSD; they're tough to find.
If this proposal passes, I'll likely hold off on modding my NC2 and try my hand locally in the new ES. If it doesn't pass, there's a good chance I'll end up dodging cones in CST.
Friendly reminder that if you're a SCCA member and have an opinion on this proposal (or any others), write a letter to the SAC (street advisory committee) providing your feedback via crbscca.com.
I get the sense they're fishing for ideas and this is just a first pass at how to handle ES as we approach the sunsetting of the 99 Sport via 30 year rule. For several reasons, I think this proposal isn't a very good one. The set of cars all have their warts (RX-8 engines, Nissan diffs) or already have good places to play in SCCA autocross without significant modification (SSC, CSX). I'd rather them let ES play out as-is for another 4-5 years, then move the ND's (both 1 and 2) down. They'll be decently cheap by then and there will probably be something else that could go into CS instead.
In reply to roninsoldier83 :
I've discovered that there's another side to that logic. Most of the time, if I win in my civic, it's my driving and not the car. It's not an SI, but a single cam 140 horse 1.8, open differential, 2800 pounds, pretty outclassed even in H Street. I used to joke that my NB1 was my power car.
The other H Street drvers or cars aren't always that fast, so I also like to compare my times to the faster classes. I've raw timed all of the G Street class a few times, and all three entries in B Street once.
No one else cares about that, but it keeps me motivated while I work on the most important thing, improving my skill behind the wheel.
In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :
I also putter away in the HS catchall class,109hp nissan micra with a 4 sp auto isn't the car to have either lol.
Luckily nobody really serious here so I'm paxing top 5.
In reply to kevlarcorolla :
By contrast, we have a fair number of very serious folks around here. It seems like almost every class locally has someone who has trophied at Nats. We even have a few National Champions. Getting a high pax here generally requires a well sorted car for the class and lots of talent that I likely fall short of possessing.
Note to self: build a well sorted car and learn to drive faster.
The Florida and South Georgia groups that I compete with have a contingent of skilled people. I've been fifth in pax a couple of times, but that's a fluke. Top ten to twenty out of 120 or so is good for me.
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