Cheap New League

[kevinthenerd]

My friend and I want to organize a new sanctioned racing league. (We work at NAPA together. He just graduated from mechanic's school with classes he could have slept in, and I'm almost done with my bachelor's in mechanical engineering with a graduate-level race engine engineering class under my belt, so I guess you can say we're not just your ordinary enthusiasts.)

One unique part about this form of racing is that the same rules will apply to drag racing and road-course racing, and it's up to you which one you want to win at. (He likes drag, but I like road course.) You CAN compete in both, but you're not going to do extremely well in both since they require different setups.

To get started we're just going to start with a circle of friends competing by the rules, and it should expand itself into a sort of communist rulebook system, spreading virally in a similar fashion that Bike Week got started in Daytona. Securing tracks will be the only challenge, but colleting fees from the individual participants shouldn't be TOO big of a problem, especially if they're paid directly to the track.

Anyway... We're trying to come up with a rule set to try to make a cheap and fun form of racing where they guy with the biggest pockets has no advantage. It has to favor people who know more about turning wrenches and designing setups than people who know how to make a buck to hire a mechanic and buy nice parts. Creativity and know-how will win races, not the latest parts out of a magazine. (Sponsorship would be therefore nonexistant and actually discouraged. All seats are bought.) It's almost an upper-class junkyard wars, I guess.

Some challenges:
Make the cars cheap but fast through innovation, creativity, and know-how. Make the rules very open but the competition fair. Keep it safe but cheap.

My ideas:

For the road course, set a maximum size restriction to keep people from winning with a car that can't be passed. Any changes to the frame must keep the original safety cage of the frame in tact. (Better yet... we can borrow safety rules from another league.) The whole car has to be priced out under a maximum price. All parts added must be shown at retail market value for comparable parts in excellent condition. (A rat-looking part might win races and be very cheap, but that particular element of luck might interfere with safety, so good-quality used parts are encouraged. Insider pricing will still go on, but at least if parts are billed at market value, any advantage from it will be eliminated.) Labor (including labor performed by the participants) will be billed at an hourly rate or at book rate, whichever is less. (People have jobs, after all, but I believe this should be cheap to encourage determination.) If another participant does not believe that a job can be performed in the claimed amount of time, he/she may challenge the other team. The challenged mechanic must prove that it can be under the scrutiny of the other participants, and if it cannot, the team will be disqualified for the rest of the season as well as the next. If it can, the challenger will be required to pay a fine to the challenged. If the quality of the reproduced work is of a questionable difference from the original but the job was still performed, the case will be dropped. The original car will be billed at Kelly Blue Book value in good condition, regardless of its purchased condition. The entire car with additions and labor cannot exceed a certain amount (which will be set very low, perhaps somewhere between $1000 to $5000).

His ideas: Go for a totally stock car with a minimum weight restriction. (I guess I better get him signed up for this forum so he can tell you guys directly. I don't remember much of what he said.)

These are just ideas. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated!

[kevinthenerd]

Catchy marketing names would be appreciated too, like Formula Cheap or Garage Prix.

[vectorspecialist]

you're basically saying build a car that pretty much anyone can afford to build. if so then in that case everyone's gonna go out and run miata's, soltices, and sky's, strap on the roll bar, and go weekend racing. or are you saying open wheel type racing like formula mazda, or prototype racing, which nomatter how u look at it it's expensive.

also would there b a lisence requirment like scca?

i mean it's a great idea, but honostly what you should consider doing, if u live in area where land is relativly cheap, is build a road course track, and have a 1/4 inside, or on the outer limits. then from what visitors suggest, u build a league of your own.

i wanna build a track where i live, but land is outrageously expensive

[kevinthenerd]

Originally Posted by vectorspecialist

you're basically saying build a car that pretty much anyone can afford to build. if so then in that case everyone's gonna go out and run miata's, soltices, and sky's, strap on the roll bar, and go weekend racing. or are you saying open wheel type racing like formula mazda, or prototype racing, which nomatter how u look at it it's expensive.

also would there b a lisence requirment like scca?

i mean it's a great idea, but honostly what you should consider doing, if u live in area where land is relativly cheap, is build a road course track, and have a 1/4 inside, or on the outer limits. then from what visitors suggest, u build a league of your own.

i wanna build a track where i live, but land is outrageously expensive

Solstices and Sky's (Skies?) would be too expensive to qualify, and Miatas would have to be old to be cheap enough. Plus, if you run a stock first-gen Miata, you're going to get murdered by the modified cars, even if you're competing against a lightly-modified Miata (i.e. stripped and tuned and maybe turboed).

The league would open up cheap implementations (i.e. "ghetto", "redneck" or "junkyard wars" versions) of technologies. Instead of an expensive water/methanol injection setup you might see some guy run his wiper fluid into his intake. Instead of nitrous you might see some guy with a tank of compressed air for a quick burst out of a corner. (He won't be able to do it more than once or twice for a fraction of a second, but it might be worth it in a close race.) You might see leafblower superchargers and lots of cut springs with camber corrections fabricated out of scrap metal, heat treated in a home oven clean cycle.

The maximum price would have to be tuned to make sure the cars don't get too fast, but at the same time cost could compromise safety as well. (Perhaps safety-only devices should be required and separate from the budget?) Frequent cost requirements will be sure to kill off the fans who want to work with last season's car, so that's a no-no too.

[kevinthenerd]

Originally Posted by vectorspecialist

you're basically saying build a car that pretty much anyone can afford to build. if so then in that case everyone's gonna go out and run miata's, soltices, and sky's, strap on the roll bar, and go weekend racing. or are you saying open wheel type racing like formula mazda, or prototype racing, which nomatter how u look at it it's expensive.

also would there b a lisence requirment like scca?

i mean it's a great idea, but honostly what you should consider doing, if u live in area where land is relativly cheap, is build a road course track, and have a 1/4 inside, or on the outer limits. then from what visitors suggest, u build a league of your own.

i wanna build a track where i live, but land is outrageously expensive

Open wheel... closed wheel... whatever you can make cheap. You're required to produce a cost report that will be scrutinized by a panel of judges. If you can figure out a way to make an open-wheeled racecar cheap (paying retail for your stuff), then go ahead and do it. I believe one requirement, though, is that you have to buy a donor at Kelley Blue Book. (If you got a good deal on it, it should still show up in the report at KBB.)

There's already a drag strip pretty close to me, but nobody seems to like it for some reason. They all call it Orlando Spinworld. Track prep isn't all that great from what I hear, but I wouldn't know.

[vectorspecialist]

ok...after that i figured it out, i think. basically u cant buy a brand new car, it has to be used and have a expense cap.

[kevinthenerd]

Originally Posted by vectorspecialist

ok...after that i figured it out, i think. basically u cant buy a brand new car, it has to be used and have a expense cap.

Depending on the price cap, I guess if you can figure out how to get a brand new Hyndai Accent under the limit then you're ok with that too, but I was thinking of something incredibly cheap, like $1000 or so. The cheaper you go, the more you stretch the minds of the participants.

[-The Stig-]

Originally Posted by kevinthenerd

Depending on the price cap, I guess if you can figure out how to get a brand new Hyndai Accent under the limit then you're ok with that too, but I was thinking of something incredibly cheap, like $1000 or so. The cheaper you go, the more you stretch the minds of the participants.

The cheaper you go, the less likely the cars will be safe.


Something to keep in mind.

[CassiesMan]

Out of curiosity, before I go into depth on why this will most likely fail, at what point durring your Mechanical Engineering degree earning did you take a course on early Soviet politics and possibly a class on Socialism, Communism, and the nature of such, and decide, hey, Communism ain't bad, lets distribute it to racing!!

I'm serious.

[-The Stig-]

... I was kind of wondering the same, but figured it was just a typo.

But please... do explain your thought process on that.

[kevinthenerd]

Originally Posted by CassiesMan

Out of curiosity, before I go into depth on why this will most likely fail, at what point durring your Mechanical Engineering degree earning did you take a course on early Soviet politics and possibly a class on Socialism, Communism, and the nature of such, and decide, hey, Communism ain't bad, lets distribute it to racing!!

I'm serious.

When people hear "communism" or "socialism" they immediately think of corrupt countries like the USSR or Cuba. It's an easy association because it's been spoon-fed since day one in the public education system. Commuism=bad. End of story. You need to think for yourself, and you need to apply principles learned in history properly.

Socialism and communism fail in the large scale because, in a large country, you don't give a DAMN about some guy thousands of miles away. You might not even care about people in your home town. You work for yourself, but because there's no reward, you don't really work at all.

You fail to realize that socialism has worked quite well in small situations when people had a genuine interest for eachother. In my general education studies I took psychology, sociology, and I used to be a theology major, so I studied liberation theology (which is essentially the rebuilding of a society from scratch and a whole lot more), and I looked into human motivation.

The early Christian communities made communism work quite well, as do modern religious communities, i.e. monks, Amish, nuns, etc. Families do it every day: in a proper family, a child won't starve just because he/she brought home a failing grade. Cirlces of friends practice communism (really socialism) when they let eachother borrow money interest-free. It all works, just on a small scale and with the right frame of mind.

In 1942 the Daytona 200 was cancelled due to war supply rationing. A bunch of guys got together and started what they called "Bike Week." Starting as a decentralized bunch of people it later grew into the commercialized bastardization we know today, and I guess the same can hapen for a league like this, but my point is that it's very easy to get something like this started if you evenly share the management and logistic responsibilities in a democratic and socialist fashion. (That last statement is not an oxymoron if you truly understand the multi-dimensional reality of political ideologies.)

[kevinthenerd]

Originally Posted by -The Stig-

The cheaper you go, the less likely the cars will be safe.


Something to keep in mind.

That's a challenge I'm trying to figure out. Perhaps safety requirements can be exempted from the costs? That way, you don't get penalized for springing for some nice harnesses or whatnot. The biggest issue is going to be figuring out some way to test the safety cages with minimal cost and intrusiveness.

[CassiesMan]

Ya know what, I don't have the energy to deal with some Starbucks commie who took a class on sociology, trying to tell me, someone working towards their Master's degree in Political Science, what communism and socialism is, and why it would work. As soon as I get that energy, I'll deal with everything that is wrong with you.

[vectorspecialist]

i thought china was a big ountry, i guess i need to go look at a map, it's worked for them since what, 1953 or so, and gee wiz, their economy is better than ours. so in all ur socialogist power, due tell me aain as to y communism sux.
honostly i think communism to a degree is better than democracy. the only thing that's a real democracy in the states is voting for state reps, house, and pres. everything else is done for us, that's y this country is so fucked up(pardon my language)
and the reason nasa and scca are so big is becuase a lot of people enjoy racing, but racing is a wealthy man's sport for a reason.
i met a guy who talked with some people ten years ago, one of the people he talked to died in the first turn of the first lap, because safety was not "up to par"
it's a great idea and all, but i dont think it'll work.
u wanna enjoy racing for cheap, open a track, make people pay u to use it, and u can run wkend races there. hell being in florida, world gt class mite race there one day, and they pay big to use a track for the wkend

[CassiesMan]

Just to clear up some painfully stupid comparisons...socialism and communism are economic policies, not forms of government. But seeing that at this point...I think two people who have posted in here have anything resembling an IQ above the literage of a Honda Civic, I'll let that go for now.