Morning Mark,
I enjoyed reading your post, some good thoughts and comments. A lot of it I can agreed with if we are going to have change, the increase in track size for example would be good if it leads to less breakages and possibly more features. I do think it would give rise to different problems, space for pitting, time to build the track and put it away and the time required to race everyone and the extra people who'd come because of the different track.
Where we have differing views is on the tyres and car set up.
Foams, I agree, can and do get chunked. But because there foam they can also be repaired very easily. OK you might not want to do it on a Friday night because the tyre needs to be trued up again but it means next week your tyres are back to full width and it didn't cost anything. With Rubber tyres "the" problem is how do you stop someone running a new set every week, or even every run? As you said you need to be on new tyres to be competitive. So as this Friday is my 3rd week back I'll have saved £50 ish on wheels, tyres and inserts by running my foams for the 3rd time. Even if I concede I reuse wheels and inserts its still around £30. I can't understand why anyone would want to return to rubber, we used to race rubber and that is exactly what happened, new boots every week, which is why I stopped racing at Ribble.
The car set up argument I also question. In answer to your comment, what stops someone racing a touring car with a buggy shell, the answer is simple, the RVRCCC construction rules.
http://www.rvrccc.co.uk/construction...gy-build-rules
The first thing it states, "Any commercially available 2WD or 4WD 1/10 scale Buggy Kit." A touring car kit isn't a buggy kit so can't be used. So hopefully we can agree on that can't happen so that's put to bed.
Lets think about sets ups. Your car at Southport on Sunday will be set up for the high grip conditions, I know you've worked on that set up to get your car working as well as it can and it does look dialled round the track. However, I'm also sure if you went to a slippy track the weekend after you'd make changes to dial your car to that track so I don't understand why your upset about people tuning their car to what is basically an on road environment at Ribble.
I think you're going to see more cars lower this week, I told a good few people last week how to achieve it. A couple of spacers under the pistons, thicker oil and stiffer springs. If you think about it all we're doing is reducing the droop whilst maintaining the min 5mm ride height.
The last thing I'd query is if an on road style set up is bad what about all the other technology from that section of our hobby. Using boost on speedos isn't at all common in off road because cars typically have more power than grip and just as in touring cars, because of boosting motor speed, we're having to pre-cool the motor to stop the car shutting down mid run. So purchasing a 50 quid piece of technology to get a speed advantage is fine but to achieve better handling a £3 pack of spacers and some fuel tube isn't?
But look, lets leave all this one side. This is all aimed at the sharp end of the racing and Ribble isn't aimed at you and I. Its aimed at Anna, Arron and Nathan to develop in racing with the emphasis on fun. It doesn't matter what daft ideas we dream up to give us an extra 10th, what matters is the people for whom Ribble is their only place to race and experience this hobby. We shouldn't add rules which complicate things, affects everyone and burdens the people running to meeting to enforce.
It comes down to choice. If you want to run foams, boost your motor or put spacers in your shocks, great do it, if you don't, then don't. All we do need to do is have fun on a Friday and leave the serious stuff to Sunday.