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Originally Posted by Speed-King
sportscar racing often prides itself for its upper-class demographics
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You lost me there, I work for a living and for some reason it does not hinder my appreciation for the sport.
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Originally Posted by Speed-King
I think it should be possible for us to discuss these matters in a civilized and respectful manner...
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I have never, and will never treat anyone on this board in a disrespectful manner, that being said guys like Ratel and Ecclestone are crying out to be made fun of. If stinky becomes a member of the board I may have to adjust.
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Originally Posted by Speed-King
But anyway:
- There's nothing indicating an appliance of success ballast in the new GT endurance series in either article at Speedweek and planetlemans so I can only comment on that in a wider sense: The big question is: What's the alternative? To me there are two: Tampering with the rules all season long or having boring races. This year they have applied rules-tampering and success-ballast, and I am more than ready to agree that they have been rather heavy-handed at times, especially in the GT1-series during the first half of the season.
Few series can survive on all out competition without any regards to parity anymore since that's too hard to sell to spectators, sponsors and funded drivers. So a transparent system of success-ballast is something I'd definitely prefer over arbitratry technical regulation changes during the season.
- as for driver ratings: I think what they are trying to do in this case is rather smart if they do it right: This time, they'll allow full-pro-lineups. There are plenty of series out there that have a "Gentleman's Trophy" or something like that, so this isn't like the approach taken here is anything radically new.
The important thing to me is, that they have a kind of upwards-compatability in the series, i.e. all teams and drivers in the pro-am-class should be allowed to score points towards the overall "Pro-Cup"-championship, but not the other way around. If they handle it that way, I am all for it. If they want to have truly separate classes it's not all that bright, as it will result in very small numbers of cars per class...
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Transparent thorough testing at the beginning of the season and locking the cars in is the way to go, not loading cars with ballast so some incompetent can win. You want to race with talented drivers you take your licks and get better or leave. But as we have discussed before competence is needed to balance the cars or you will have VLN “99” all over again, which of course was corrected the next year to the desired effect, putting Porsche back on top, but that’s another argument/discussion.