Quote:
Originally Posted by Locust
If you feel like you have to spend $50,000 to compete in Street Modified then you are really misunderstanding the sport. Easily 95+% of your improvement at autocross will come from just getting experience and buying a good set of tires. When you start doing things like CF parts, slotted rotors, etc. you are chasing hundredths of seconds.
Take one of these and you'll see what really goes into being good at auto-cross: http://www.evoschool.com/
Right now you're just blindly making statements that are rather insulting to the sport.
It sounds like you haven't even looked into what your local clubs run. If you were in Washington I would tell you that we have a Novice class that runs for a full year (8 events) where the only requirement is that you are on street tires 200 TW or higher. After that we have an Intermediate Street Tire class (IST) that has the same requirement that you can be in for 2 years before you even need to pick an actual car based class. And locally here if you want to run SM in our Non-stock PAX class you can add a street tire index if you don't want to run R-Comps. That's just for our SCCA club. I could go run at two other clubs in the area and have extremely favorable classing where they don't care if I put a turbo on the car. My Evo has all kinds of SM parts on it but I can run in a sedan class with lightly modified cars at one of the clubs if I want to.
Please go do some research on what your local clubs offer instead of asking for advice and then badmouthing the sport when you don't get the exact answer you want.
You said you got beat by 3 seconds at your first event. That's the wrong way to look at things. Have you had any track experience before? You have less than a full year of autocross experience and you're worried about SM classing? Very wrong way to look at this. Many long time autocrossers could straight time you in far slower cars due to experience alone. You should be getting as much seat time as possible and just trying to improve your technique. |
I think you are missing the point....
I went to an event, got put into a class that I can't be competitive in and now my options are to spend money to modify my car to be capable in that class or tear my car apart to be in a different class. I understand that I am not at a point where I am a competitive driver yet, but why would I even come back knowing that I can't afford to be or have to give up on having an enjoyable car.