That's a fair response Jono, however nobody told you to spec 30 cars once a month by forcing drivers into individual cars. Ask anyone who's had event BoP and they'll tell you before you start to minimise variables for both your sanity and for close racing. Less variables is less potential problems. I've said it before defending that LM3 hour BoP, its hard enough to do with 3 or 6 cars let alone 16, and as much as it was cool to do for a one off for LM last year, was it not maybe too ambitious to do it for every race this year? Surely you've had that thought.
Now to correct some things, I said that Monza is about accel not top speed. I referred to top speed because we have no nice easy number to point to for acceleration. I note you didn't disclose that top speed either.
I also did not say that I drove badly, its not like I'm in bad form as 24 hours later I was notching a Div 1 Sunday league win, there were no excuses like traffic, illness, distraction or anything to point at. The pace out of the car was all I could find through my iterations of tuning, I PB'd in that session. I even went looking for more and made setup changes in the session to see what else I could find after I could no longer see my best lap on the board any more.
I don't understand how I'm supposed to raise a question about the BoP I have, until I have it. We were actively waiting for BoP to be released so we could start testing as we didn't want to get too far along to have the power or weight change forcing all sorts of setup changes trying to get the car back to the feeling it had. The second I saw the BoP updates to the WRX I knew I was in trouble. I even posted about it, I had no idea how the car needed to be made heavier and less powerful when it was pretty much where it needed to be at Catalunya, where I made all my time up in sector 2 (the mid speed sweeper sector) and we move to a low speed corner, high speed straight scenario. I saw the splits during qualy where I was down 2-3 tenths in S3 (the low speed handling sector) and 1-2 in S1 (the big straight).
There was always going to be an imbalance in car performance as it is impossible to get it totally nailed down, but around the least driver dependant circuit, the gap in machinery is most visibly on display and it doesn't look great seeing guys who qualified in the top 6 at the technically challenging Catalunya occupying the back 3 slots on the grid, well off the midfield.
Why did Xephos not say add weight to the car? Because until we get through qualy we don't really know where we all stand. Why ask for a BoP change when you could be smack bang in the midfield anyway? Xephos and I knew we were worlds apart on pace, but we had no idea if it was because I was slow, the WRX was slow, if Xephos was under rated or if the BMW was just too damn fast. We could sort of guess some part of WRX car/driver was slow, but now we know for sure it is the M6 being way too fast. This is why we were asking about qual results, we wanted to know sooner where we stood to see if we could change some parameters for a better race. But it is now Friday and you seem adamant on living with the M6 as it is.
With the BoP stance of take it or leave it, simply, I'm just not going to race this one. I love endurance racing, and I'm seriously glad to have a series to race in. I had my crack at hosting one back in GT6 and I know how hard a gig this is, I made mistakes and had my bad BoP days, but not like this. I don't mind having to do the same fast lap times for hours on end to get the job done because I know that is possible to achieve and makes you really earn any result that comes your way. But I can't race for 3 hours knowing I'm going to get lapped by Xephos twice and yourself once when I'm giving it my all. In the words of SVG when he realised he wasn't in the hunt on Sunday in Newscatle, the buzz is gone. There is no excitement, nothing to look forward to when you know your result will only be as high as those who do not finish.
@Viperzed the BoP of the car is seen as independent to that of the driver. So while your rank upgrade costs you 3% weight, the car still received a 1% decrease for this round.
If a driver were to abandon the series and have their car taken by another driver of a different rank, the base BoP would remain unchanged, even if the specs that the driver would need to meet do change via their ranking.