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Originally Posted by MattR
Bump...It's that time of year again! Is PAX Fair? Is the Reno region PAX champion the "Best " driver for this year? Where are we on this discussion?
I've read John's articles front to back, and I'm still not convinced that the altitude power loss of a N/A car is as significant as stated. Especially taking into consideration that AWD cars have huge power loss to the drivetrain, and huge HP rear wheel drive cars are constantly fighting to gain traction during cool events, etc.
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I think John's analysis is pretty "on". But I think it's a moot point. So what if the turbo cars have an advantage... none of our region's drivers are consistantly good enough for it to make a real difference. Winners in our region tend to win dominantly... the only exception this year is SM, and that's a class where everyone in the class would have been decimated if a decent driver in a fully prepped car showed up.
IMO, if you care enough about winning to have a big problem w/ using the "national" PAX factors, and truely believe that the altitude is what's keeping you from winning, you should go out and buy a new turbo car. John Evans is a great example of that... he really thought he was getting beaten because of PAX and altitude... so he got a WRX for a season. Now he drives a Z. Seems like the turbo didn't make that much of a difference. Whatever the car you're racing with, you have to be able to drive it 100% if you want to win.
And the street tire modifier has seemed to work *very* well. Since we allowed people to switch between street and race tires within their classes, it seems like people placed just about where they would normally regardless of the tires under them. In fact, if it was at all warm, it looked like the race tires are still the faster tires even though the street tires have gotten proportionally better and better over the years. The nice thing is that if you want to run on street tires, you're not totally outclassed... you just have to drive a little better than the race tire folks. IMO, that's right on...