Dezoris

EDIT-

I am barking up the wrong tree.

Long story short, wish there was a regulated STOCK class. Without any mods allowed.

Most you guys are great at what you do, so me knocking the rules classes of the SCCA, that are like cathlic law to some people makes me look like a bitch.

payneinthe

Let's cut this train wreck off before it starts. Go to sccaforums.com and read the 50 million pages of whining about "true stock" classes.

tmorrow

It's all subjective. I'm on OE shocks so of course I'd love "true" stock, but when I have some nice DA's (someday?) I'd be against it. It wouldn't matter anyhow because when you run it hard on the stock FSB it's all you can do to not loop it anyway.

Like I've told others, the closest you're gonna get to what you want is to have enough people (that want to run AS on street tires to) go to your region's director and persuade them to implement an "AS-S" class for you. I don't assume you're an asshat but what I said is true - run with the fast guys to get faster. If it's only for fun you should, theoretically, have as much fun winning HS in your S2000 by 5 seconds as being dead last in AM by 15. You may not have as good of a chance in AS to bring home some $6 plastic trophy but the PAX was only 0.002 different. I won't win my region, division, or trophy at Nationals, but I'll get faster @ mid-pack than I would picking up easy regional & divisional wins.



The Elise did go to SS.

Mrsideways

You can have that, It's called Martin Sports Car Club in Orlando Florida. They run a TRUE STOCK class, They also run a Street mod Street tire class which is anything goes as long as it's on street tires. Forumla SAE cars for instance. And you know what.... IMHO it doesn't work. The Street tire street mod class turned into a class just for people to jump to who want points. The club is being pushed from the outside to update their rules of stock class to resemble something more SCCA like but the thought of budget racing from the inside keeps it stock. Whats happened instead is each class only has 1 competetive car. Fact is Shocks sway bars and tires help level the playing feild among cars. They have an extremly low turn out because of this. True STOCK doesn't work. But I would love to see Double adjustables eliminated from stock class. But then you'll get people spending big bucks to have their singles revalved 100+ times. Just my $0.02

Dezoris

I won't complain further those were some good responses. Is there any reason, adjustable shocks were decided as being part of a stock class?

Based on the responses, I assume its because people revalve shocks and no one would know.

solo2racer

There are two arguments for adjustable shocks. The logic goes something like this...

----- 1st -----

The club wants to allow people to replace their shocks with cheap replacements rather than having to buy expensive OEM parts. This means allowing Sears, Midas, etc shocks. Well, if you're going to allow that, then why not GAB, Tokiko, Koni sport, etc? They're the same price and better quality and performance.

So now you've decided to allow aftermarket parts into the class - where do you draw the line? Define a rule that allows just the cheap ones but not the expensive ones. Oh, and do it without using price as a limitation. Just the configuration of the shocks.

Single adjustment only? Well, what about Penske singles? They're $2000/set and give better performance that the OEM shocks.

No external canisters? What about Koni 28's? They're $4000/set and give better performance than the Penskes.

Single adjustment and no external canisters? Koni 30's at $3000/set plus a few rebuilds a year.

Double adjustable and external canisters? It opens it up to anything from $800/set Koni sports to $5000/set Motons. It actually give competitors better choices and a wider range of prices.

----- 2nd -----

If you require OEM parts only, then cars that come with better shocks from the factory will dominate over cars without the equivalent. Neon ACRs came with single adjustable shocks - they would dominate GS if no one else could put adjustable shocks on their cars.

Type R's come with better shocks than BMW 330s in DS. If you disallow shocks, the ITR will be the only car to have.

There are examples like this throughout the class structure. By allowing shocks, you give more car options to competitors than if they have to pick the car with the best OEM shocks.

Make sense?

Orthonormal

Basically, it's because shocks wear out and basic adjustable shocks like Koni Sports and Tokico Illuminas are cheap enough that they often cost less than buying the OEM shock from the dealer.

Allowing adjustable shocks has the added advantage of bringing cars that came stock with lousy suspensions a little closer in performance to the cars that came stock with great suspensions.

The reason that crazy expensive shocks are allowed is that nobody has found a way to draw the line between cheap, off the shelf shocks and expensive, custom shocks, in a way that can't be subverted.

The idea that if stock shocks were required, people would alter the internals, is one argument that gets made. However, it's not one of the more convincing ones for me because the rules already forbid a bunch of things that would be hard to detect or prove.

If you get curious about all the arguments in favor of and against "stock is stock", or different proposals for how to solve the stock category shock dilemma, check out www.sccaforums.com under the Rules & Classing and the Stock Category forums. Search for "shocks" "stock" "remote reservoir" and so on. Payne may not have been exaggerating with the "50 million pages" comment...there will be plenty for you to digest.

rzrsedg

What about the body material? Ban non-OEM aluminum bodied shocks.

I think the real issue is that the serious folks *like* having the option to buy racing shocks. If the members *like* it then you don't ban it...

-Sean

aklucsarits

One major reason that the SCCA stock Solo2 classes permit any shock is for safety concerns. Some cars, especially older cars, left the factory with woefully underdamped suspensions. Their weak shocks could not handle dampening the ocillations of the factory springs - making the cars unpredicable and downright dangerous in quick transitions (i.e. Solo2). So a big part of the rationale for non-stock shock valving originally being permitted was for safety reasons.

Another big reason that adjustable shocks are allowed dates back several decades to when adjustable shocks first started appearing on the market as OE replacements for street cars...

Back 50, 40, 30, and even 20 years ago, shocks simply did not last as long as they do now. Today you can go 100,000mi+ on a set of the comparitively high-tech factory shocks found on most modern cars. But 30-40 years ago, it was not unheard of to need to replace your shocks every 20,000-30,000 mi or so. So some company that made shocks (I'm not sure who it was originally - Koni, maybe?) came up with a great idea: Design the shock such that the valving is adjustable to compensate for the valving wear that occurs over time. Now when the valving on your shocks starts wearing out and the ride of your car gets bouncy, you don't need to buy a whole set of new shocks anymore! You just adjust your adjustable shocks to a firmer valving to compensate for the inherant wear. Once you have adjusted them several times, you would end up at the limit of their adjustment range. Then it's time to buy new shocks. So instead of buying 4 new replacement shocks every 25,000mi, now you could buy adjustable shocks and just keep adjusting them as they wore out. You might get 100,000mi or more out of your shocks if you bought the adjustable kind - which was pretty revolutionary back then.

Some poeple who were interested in performance driving realized another benefit from these new adjustable shocks - If you were willing to sacrifice the extra long lifespan of the adjustable shock, you could crank up the valving and get firmer valving than your stock shock. You could now trade shock lifespan for better performance.

Now today, adjustable shocks are almost exclusively designed and sold with performance in mind. But when that SCCA rule for stock class modifications was written, that wasn't really the case. But over the decades, the "any shock" allowance was pretty much grandfathered in to permenance.

Andrew

solo2racer

The Koni 30's are steel bodies. I believe you can get Penske's with steel bodies as well (7100 series).