Street Tires in Stock

[Kurt Rahn]

This topic was brought up deep in another thread (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6321&start=75#p86952), and I wanted to make it a standalone, since it's important. If you are driving a car locally in one of the stock classes on street tires and would like to drive your car in a full-fledged class at national events like the San Diego Tour or El Toro ProSolo in the future, you *need* to sign up for this year's Tour and Pro and join the RT* classes. This year is a trial run for RT, and the national office, SEB, etc. will be scrutinizing the number of entries. They will use this data to directly influence their decision about whether there is enough interest to continue offering RT* classes at national events. If you sign up in an RT* class for the tour and the Pro, you are voting "yes" to street tires on stock class cars. If you don't sign up in an RT* class for those events, you are voting "no." Just want to make that clear, for the newer folks among us who've missed some of the knockdown dragout flame wars on the subject of Street Tires in Stock. Until this year, street-tire-in-stock wasn't officially recognized at national events, and unless we vote with our entries, they very likely won't be in the future either.

[Mako Koiwai]

And only two more days to register for the SD Tour at the discounted rate

[John Stimson]

Continuing that discussion from the other thread:

Since the very beginning of the RT discussion, I have been trying to understand why we are being lumped into an SK1/SK2 INDEXED type of class to prove interest in "street tire in stock".

Because:
1) At the national level, any DOT tire is allowed in the Stock category regardless of treadwear. That covers the individual classes SS/AS/BS/CS/DS/ES/FS/GS/HS. There is no official national level class for stock rules with treadwear >= 140 tires.

2) Generally, in the past, most local competitors who got serious enough to continue autocrossing and wanted to run a stock car, were willing (or even eager) to buy low-treadwear "R-compound" tires, because that's what the other local competitors were racing on, because that was what they had to run for national tours and prosolos. It was good to tune and practice on the same tires as you're going to use when you try to beat, say, Scott McHugh or Gary Thomason. (See "futility" in the OED).

3) The local region does have quite a bit of interest in running Stock rules with "street" tires, so CSCC and others have offered a class or set of classes for those people to compete in. However, in general the level of participation is not sufficient for there to be meaningful competition if individual street tire classes are offered that correspond to each stock class (SS-ST, AS-ST, etc). The Detroit region apparently does, but they're exceptional in that respect. The San Francisco Region tried it Detroit-style for about two years then switched back, because the only class that regularly had more than one driver in it was GS.

4) Therefore, multiple base classes have to be lumped together so that drivers have some competition, and the most fair way available is to use the index system. Note that if participation increases, then the classes can be split more finely, until there are enough competitors to have all nine stock classes represented with corresponding street tire classes.

From my little pee-brain point-of-view, it appears that we're headed toward a permanent SK type of street tire indexed class, as opposed to a street tires only in stock set of classes. No one has explained to me that that is NOT the case. Even though I have asked, even at SCCA.

There is absolutely no chance of the SEB ever adopting an index based class permanently. Trust me. They were really unfriendly to the idea of having one even on a temporary basis, and I think the only reason you're seeing it now is because Howard stepped in and said "we're doing this". The RT classes are a test, and only a test, to see if there is enough interest in using street tires with Stock rules, for the SEB to even bother thinking about how it could be implemented on a long term basis.

The only long term options I see are either a blanket switch to street tires in the stock classes (or some of them, although I don't like that idea), or an additional category of street tires using stock-like rules and its own classing scheme. It's going to be really hard to make everyone happy with either of those choices, and it's difficult to figure out how to get to either of those schemes from what we have now, without considerable pain and work. And the SEB doesn't even have to worry about it if the RT classes aren't chock full this year. If they aren't, then the whole idea of national stock street tire blows over and the SEB has a nice solid example to hold up when people ask to switch stock to street tires in the future.

Show up and force them to think about it.

If the intent of the SEB is to determine the level of street tire interest in the stock classes, why is the test this year based on index? Stock classes can compete NOW on street tires without an index. It's allowance of those pesky R-Comps that get in the way.

Same reason it's done that way locally. They are not expecting a huge turnout from RT. They're not going to temporarily ban DOT-Rs as a "trial". In order to track street tire participation, they need to have separate classes, because they can't obtain reliable data from the event results about who was on street tires and who wasn't in the stock classes. And they certainly don't go scouring the local forums to figure it out.

[Ed Holley]

Continuing that discussion from the other thread:

Since the very beginning of the RT discussion, I have been trying to understand why we are being lumped into an SK1/SK2 INDEXED type of class to prove interest in "street tire in stock".

Because:
1) At the national level, any DOT tire is allowed in the Stock category regardless of treadwear. That covers the individual classes SS/AS/BS/CS/DS/ES/FS/GS/HS. There is no official national level class for stock rules with treadwear >= 140 tires.

2) Generally, in the past, most local competitors who got serious enough to continue autocrossing and wanted to run a stock car, were willing (or even eager) to buy low-treadwear "R-compound" tires, because that's what the other local competitors were racing on, because that was what they had to run for national tours and prosolos. It was good to tune and practice on the same tires as you're going to use when you try to beat, say, Scott McHugh or Gary Thomason. (See "futility" in the OED).

3) The local region does have quite a bit of interest in running Stock rules with "street" tires, so CSCC and others have offered a class or set of classes for those people to compete in. However, in general the level of participation is not sufficient for there to be meaningful competition if individual street tire classes are offered that correspond to each stock class (SS-ST, AS-ST, etc). The Detroit region apparently does, but they're exceptional in that respect. The San Francisco Region tried it Detroit-style for about two years then switched back, because the only class that regularly had more than one driver in it was GS.

4) Therefore, multiple base classes have to be lumped together so that drivers have some competition, and the most fair way available is to use the index system. Note that if participation increases, then the classes can be split more finely, until there are enough competitors to have all nine stock classes represented with corresponding street tire classes.

From my little pee-brain point-of-view, it appears that we're headed toward a permanent SK type of street tire indexed class, as opposed to a street tires only in stock set of classes. No one has explained to me that that is NOT the case. Even though I have asked, even at SCCA.

There is absolutely no chance of the SEB ever adopting an index based class permanently. Trust me. They were really unfriendly to the idea of having one even on a temporary basis, and I think the only reason you're seeing it now is because Howard stepped in and said "we're doing this". The RT classes are a test, and only a test, to see if there is enough interest in using street tires with Stock rules, for the SEB to even bother thinking about how it could be implemented on a long term basis.

The only long term options I see are either a blanket switch to street tires in the stock classes (or some of them, although I don't like that idea), or an additional category of street tires using stock-like rules and its own classing scheme. It's going to be really hard to make everyone happy with either of those choices, and it's difficult to figure out how to get to either of those schemes from what we have now, without considerable pain and work. And the SEB doesn't even have to worry about it if the RT classes aren't chock full this year. If they aren't, then the whole idea of national stock street tire blows over and the SEB has a nice solid example to hold up when people ask to switch stock to street tires in the future.

Show up and force them to think about it.

If the intent of the SEB is to determine the level of street tire interest in the stock classes, why is the test this year based on index? Stock classes can compete NOW on street tires without an index. It's allowance of those pesky R-Comps that get in the way.

Same reason it's done that way locally. They are not expecting a huge turnout from RT. They're not going to temporarily ban DOT-Rs as a "trial". In order to track street tire participation, they need to have separate classes, because they can't obtain reliable data from the event results about who was on street tires and who wasn't in the stock classes. And they certainly don't go scouring the local forums to figure it out.

Thank you John, for taking the time to explain things.