Hudyman

Brian Conners tried the Boxster Spyder PDK in SS. He even had a national SS champ co-drive with him and it was not competitive to the GT3, Elise and Corvette's in SS. I have owned 4 Boxster variants and 2 Cayman S variants. Out of the box my 3.4 991 is faster than them all! After driving the 991S is in another league all together, more akin to the GT3. Imagine the new 991 GT3!? What class is that thing in?

sjfehr

Pretty sure it's SSP for the time being!

Hudyman

Excellent - The SSP 991 GT3 is going to crush my little 220hp Elise SC. Time to trade for the 991 GT3. That is going to be a cheater car - maybe they should put it in XP - LOL!

jpgunn

I agree -- the 991S is going to be a good car for Super Street, as are the 997.2 GT3s, and the Loti. I don't think the Cayman and Boxster should be in Super Street. A Street would be a great place for them. If they would run in numbers.

The new Cayman S may be too much of an overdog for A Stock, and is definitely not affordable (no used market yet).

jpgunn

Back On Topic -- Any news on 20" tires that are 140+? Ideally 305/315 and 245/255 range sizes in the Porsche Outer Diameters (27.2-26.7")

sjfehr

Your best bet is probably BFG Rival. Comes in 265/35ZR20, 285/35ZR20 & 315/35ZR20 - you can go a little wider on both wheels than OEM.

Rotmilky

I'm not sure they haven't just done that to the upcoming SS class. They've moved the majority of Vettes and Vipers out. Just taking a quick gander at the remaining cars that have a history of success, that leaves the GT3 as the most successful car left.

As to the logic of lumping a while bunch of Porsche cars into the same class (many of them seriously outclassed by a GT3), I wrote a letter to the SCCA to try to get the base 997 moved down to AS. My justification was that the 996 40th anniversary had 40HP more than the base 997, so the 997 base would be competitive, but not better than the 996 40th. They said the 997 was appropriately classed in SS. I talked to one of the board members about what happened and he gave me a rather lengthy explanation (that I don't want to go into here). But in any event, he gave me the impression that the odds wouldn't be good that they would split the 997 classification like that. With the vipers and vettes moving to AS, I've decided that SS is likely to be the easier class to be in next season...so I'm not gonna bother trying to get it reclassified.

I'm probably not good enough to care either way. I just wanted a better PAX modifier.

PedalFaster

Classing fashion swings back and forth between best of breed (all trim levels of a particular car go into the same class) and a la carte (different trim levels are classed according to their specific potential). The current SAC seems to be leaning more towards best of breed (besides this, witness the wholesale move of multiple generations of BMW 3-Series into F Street); this decision appears consistent with that.

burglar

I saw the car run at the Toledo Pro. Looking at the results, Pat had a terrible 2nd day.

edfishjr

You know, given that it was a Pro and what those Spyders were giving up at the start, I'd say they showed they were the equal of the others everywhere else.

Hudyman

Super Stock should be a class reserved for a manufacturers best product. For those fortunate enough to have driven both GT3 and Boxster know they are in two distinct classes on the street, autocross and track. SCCA recognizes the differences between the Boxster and Boxster S by putting them in different classes - they should do the same with the GT3, Carrera S and Carrera products.

PedalFaster

Ok, where do you propose to put them? GT3 in Super Stock, Carrera S in A Stock, and base 991 in B Stock? The base 991's likely faster than the base 997, so to be consistent those should be separated too, and then there's the 996, 993, etc. 991 in BS, 997 in CS, 996 in ES, 993 in FS?

There is a finite number of classes into which to place cars, and there a large and vocal contingent that believes that there are still too many classes. Because of this, not every car can be classed where it's nationally competitive. Conversely, pretty much any car can be locally competitive. That seems like a reasonable compromise to me -- a quick driver can be competitive locally in almost any car, and people with national-level aspirations recognize that they need to bring one of the class' top cars rather than whatever they happened to have on hand.

burglar

Stop being logical, I want a class just for me.

sjfehr

I have a grand vision for a perfect index system, where every car at every prep level is given an accurate pax appropriate to it's performance capability on a given surface in given conditions; it's a classing scheme that should, in theory, protect the investments of every current autocrosser while having vast appeal to new and future SCCA members, too.

BUT, the attitude of the SRS BIZNESS autocrossers is "**** you if you're not willing to buy the 'the' car for your class, you clearly don't care enough to win" / "If you can afford a Porsche, you can afford a CSP miata and a truck to tow it with" etc. I don't see classing or rules changing; the 991 (and even 987.2S) are feared to be too fast for AS so (and with good reason), so they get relegated to SS. On a 60 second course, it's a 0.60 second difference by PAX between AS and SS, and 0.66 by DAX; and 0.3 seconds between ASR and SSR, so if conventional wisdom is true and the 991 and 987.2S are actually too fast for AS/ASR, they're at least not multiple seconds off the pace for SS/SSR.

PedalFaster

For better or worse (I think for better), I can't see a system that has an individual PAX for every car ever being adopted nationally. Too many people hate racing on an index for that to happen. I don't mind racing on an index, and I still wouldn't want to race that way.

As for your "SRS BIZNESS" characterization, even if that's true of a few people on the forums, it's definitely not true of the people who make classing decisions. Those people agonize over how best to ensure that popular, attainable cars are classed competitively. Key words there are "popular" and "attainable". Why should the SCCA split hairs between different variations of $100k Porsche when there have probably been fewer than a dozen 911s campaigned at the national level in the past decade? The demand's just not there.

Edit: Having said that, put me in the camp of people who aren't very sympathetic when a $100k car is classed conservatively because, yes, you could buy (say) a nationally competitive ES Miata for not much more than the price of a set of wheels and tires for a 991.