There's discussion on the FB F600 page; we are trying to get the numbers up. For autocross F-modified has a really good following but for road racing not so much.
For me single seaters are pretty much the end all be all but it occurred to me there are a lot of people who don't feel that way.
I know that most track days don't allow them but I'm specifically talking about wheel to wheel racing.
So tell me why you wouldn't race one.
Fear of replacing bespoke parts.
If it rains I'll be very wet.
Because there is karting.
more places to race and more participants and maybe faster.
One concern is personal safety in a crash. Modern F1/etc cars are pretty safe, but the formula cars that are available at grassroots prices aren't going to stand up to hitting a wall the way that a good cage in a production car will.
j_tso said:Fear of replacing bespoke parts.
If it rains I'll be very wet.
What he said. And, good ones tend to not be inexpensive.
I don't have the means to get a racecar to the track.
In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :
That's a fair cop is especially in 36 year old car like mine.
Newer F600s can be had for 12-15K and those run the attenuator boxes at the front of the car. The side impact in these cars is as good as a production car due to the full width sidepods.
A Pro Formula Mazda has a carbon tub but the bottom end for those cars is 30-32K. That isn't much more than a front line Spec Miata but it's still more than most folks have to spend on a toy.
When I was 16, I couldn't work on the corners for our National event, but they let me help the Course Marshall. The first race that morning was FV, about 35 cars. Heading off into turn one, a fast right-hander, a few touched wheels, sending one car airborne as it did a few spins along it's nose to tail axis. I vowed then that I wouldn't race open wheel cars.
In reply to racerfink :
Ironic you mention this. It's actually the reason why F500/600 cars have full width sidepods. The SCCA did this as a way of keeping the cars from interlocking wheels.
I'm moderately tall and distinctly fat.
Do F600s still have a one-step-from-kart suspension?
That removes a lot of the interest of a "real" race car for me. But it's not like I was teetering on the brink and I could be way out of date.
In reply to Jesse Ransom :
We do have what could be termed "over engineered bump stops" in place of shocks and springs with the rubber pucks in canisters. Fact is that it articulates more than you would think. It is a specific point of cost savings over shocks and springs. Suspension tuning is a big performance area for any car, so on place of a set of shocks you would have custom tuned that cost thousands of dollars and need rebuilds, you have these canisters where a $90 sheet of rubber from McMaster and a holesaw gives you at least a half dozen rebuilds of the whole cars suspension that is the same quality of the car next to you.
By the time you have a canister acting on the rubber like this (|( and put it through a rocker arm suspension, you do get about the same useable effective motion range that other formula cars have, which is only a couple of inches. I'll shoot a video some time showing the travel when I bounce on the front of my car.
Would it be faster with a shock/spring, sure. But it would add a few thousand dollars to the cost of the car to make an already fast car a bit faster. It works better than you think.
If we're specifically talking F600, there is nothing about the cars themselves that would stop me from racing a 'modernish' one. I've long been of the opinion that they might just be the best thing SCCA has to offer.
The biggest problem for me is that low participation is a self-fulfilling prophecy that has been on-going for years now. That simply makes the typical barriers to entry insurmountable for most. Who is going to dedicate the time, money, and space to starting a racing endeavor where the seasons race results show that they'll be lucky if there would be 1 or 2 (and dropping) other F5/FF cars on the track with them on any given day, and even luckier still if they actually run the same times.
Based almost exclusively on local participation rates, and ignoring cost, SRF3 is probably the only SCCA dedicated race platform I'd consider right now. But for better or worse, factoring in the other barriers to entry, an endurance racing team effort in a production chassis is what has lured me to actually get into wheel-to-wheel racing.
When I was racing my Neon, I would be in the paddock thinking about tire Temps, and the open wheel guys would be out on track, generally coming in on the hook with one or more wheels pointed the entirely wrong direction.
Fragile, too small for me, enclosed trailer required.
Too much air time when you kiss someone's tire.
bentwrench said:Because there is karting.
more places to race and more participants and maybe faster.
Maybe more participants but a mid field F600 is as fast as a Formula Ford... for about 1/3 the price tag.
In reply to Tom1200 :
I'm sorry but I just can't connect to formula cars. I know they are buckets faster than cars made from stock bodies. However a Formula car makes me feel like I need a lab coat and a slide rule.
While a production car makes me dream about flat out down the Mulsene hoping my drum brakes have one more stop left in them before fading to oblivion.
For those bringing up safety concerns, like tire contact, remember that we're more specifically talking about formula cars that can look like this:
Thank you, much better. I did FV for a bit, it gets noisy with someone's tire against the body.
Driven5 said:
Are you differentiating between formula cars and sports racers? That full body work looks to me like a sports racer. (I know several cars can run either formula (open wheel) or sports racer (full bodywork).
In reply to Apexcarver :
Point taken, and I think it's fair to call that a win for the platform. Bang for the buck is always good stuff.
It's fairly irrational, but my aversion to the pucks isn't about how well they work, but about whether I'm having a "proper" purpose-built racecar experience without damper tuning.
Pertinent only because it is probably the thing that makes F600 less than appealing (to me, and maybe I'm alone?) as a step between karts or street car friendly events and FV or FF.
That is, is the open-wheel issue really the central issue with F600 grid size?
In reply to BoulderG :
I autocross and road race a Thunder Roadster on the road course I run with open wheel 1 and have never been worried next car for me will be a formula Ford
Regarding formula cars in general rather than F600s specifically, most of the reasons are budget-related: Like any track-only car, it's a lot of money for something that can't even get you around town if your DD breaks down and that absolutely needs to be trailered everywhere. Parts can be expensive as well. I wouldn't say I don't have the money for any such car, but it's a lot harder to justify for a pure toy vs. something that can still have practical uses. I haven't owned a non-streetable car yet and I'm not terribly inclined to do so in the future.
"Because there is karting" is also a factor. They share most of the formula car's problems but they're dialed way down to a much more manageable size. Lower costs, probably more opportunities for non-race track time, can be transported in the back of a pickup/van or on a roof rack, no shortage of competition venues.
One issue with formula cars that karts mostly don't share is the driving experience. As a car becomes more F1-ish - lighter, faster, and more downforce-dependent with an awesomer power-to-weight ratio, it becomes less fun and more difficult, physically exhausting, and frightening to drive. Too much of the non-driving parts of racing already feel like work, I don't want that feeling to seep into the driving experience as well.
Safety can also be a factor with any small fast open-wheel-ish car, including karts. I imagine this is scaring some people off, especially those who could easily afford them and have a lot to lose.
In reply to BoulderG :
I'm differentiating that as a formula car, as defined by the largest formula car and sports racer sanctioning body in the country.
My biggest complaint with formula cars, aside from never being able to reach the pedals (my F500 had a real Little Rascals setup so I could get the leverage I wanted), is the fact that you have limited opportunities to run them. Aside from sanctioned SCCA events, most TT and track day groups don't allow open-wheel cars (and, yeas, even full side pod cars are considered open wheel in this case). So testing and non-competitive opportunities are limited.
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