Quote:
Originally Posted by FormulaFox
Or, more importantly, 20 years ago when it was at it's most popular in terms of eyeballs on product.
|
You must be young, because TA was not at a peak 20 years ago. They were great in the early 70's and then fell off a cliff. Then they had some success in the late 70's when teams were jumping from IMSA to TA. Sort of like when Peter Gregg was ticked at IMSA and went to run TA because of the rules (which we call BOP today) and then he'd go back to IMSA when he had it with TA (sound familiar).
80's saw a resurgence of TA because Can Am finally bit the dust and SCCA Pro had to make it work so they just copied the GTO rules and called it a day. Then Audi screwed that all up and then it just reverted to no tech thus finally gave up the ghost in the early 90's. After that, it just ran on life support and survived like all racing did with the dot.com boom. After that bubble burst, it tanked.
In the last 20 years it became a multi class series because TA1 was on a crash course with the inevitable (which was death). As for today, it's a 2-3 car TA1 class with a few field fillers. TA2 is healthy with the rest being a bunch of one offs. As usual, let's take the one bright spot (TA2) and ruin it. As we all know, the rich teams don't mind spending more money, as for the rest, they park the cars and sell them on ragingjunk. I the end. TA can be like IMSA and PWC where they are celebrating their record number of entrants for a specific class yet the overall never goes up. Case in pint, PWC at VIR. Just hanging around 100 entrants no matter what the rules are.
In the end, TA has been off of everyone's radar since the mid 90's. All they do is relive the old days. it is pretty funny that the best race team of all time reverted back to a tumor chassis. Never seen that coming......