i always thought that any racing sport should have an unlimited class competition
sailing car racing etc
maybe just have some very basic criteria like has to have at least 2 wheels or must have a sail and a hull i thought drag racing with funny cars and dragsters were unlimited but maybe i misremember
In essence, the All American Soap Box Derby does have an "unlimited class".
It's known as the Ultimate Speed Program. It was instituted for those teams that wanted to continue to build homemade cars, but it's not for the faint of heart. I know one team that spent over $100K testing and building a car. The team was led by a guy who owns a company that makes bob sleds for a number of Olympic teams, so he had the facilities, the engineers and the labor to build a winning car.
Do a Google image search for "soap box ultimate speed" for some cool images of Ultimate Speed cars.
There's a picture about 4 rows down of a driver lying flat on her back. She is wearing prism glasses so that she can look through a small window at the front of the car. Once the hatch is closed, the car is completely smooth along the top.
We modified a Masters division car for my daughter to drive in the Ultimate race. The only team we beat was a team that took a Thule car top ski carrier and added some wheels. (2nd row down on the image search, the last last I looked) We didn't expect to do very well, but it got us one more year of building and racing, so it was worth it.
interesting maybe unlimited does not always make sense
even with the millions they spend on america's cup boats they still have to build them with constraints
maybe where they are already spending millions in the top class an unlimited class would make more sense hydrofoil sailboats might be interesting to see racing
Electric Comet wrote in news:n1j3rn$4cm$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
As desirable as that is, eventually you run into the twin problems of it being too expensive and too fast for safety on any available course.
Pretty much all forms of car racing require exactly 4 wheels, and they have to be on the 4 corners of the car (this rule being because someone built a car with 3 wheels on one side, and 1 on the other).
No, drag racing hasn't had an unlimited class since the
50's (or maybe early 60's). The only unlimited class I can think of would be LSR at Bonneville.
As desirable as that is, eventually you run into the twin
---------------------------------------------------------- Cost doesn't seem to be a problem for L Ellison or Bill Koch when they won the America's Cup in their respective years.
"Cost" was one of the 2 main reasons the Soap Box Derby Masters division almost became extinct. Having the expertise to build a highly customized car was the other. The thing is, you really can't have one without the other.
Building a highly customized car was not cheap, nor were all of the weekend trips to other cities to race. Weekend rallies were used for 2 things: seat time for your driver and testing of different tune-ups, weight distributions, etc.
It was no coincidence that the families that we saw at rallies weekend after weekend were the same families that qualified to race in the World Championship races in Akron, year after year.
The problem was, those of us with highly customized cars (and high spend rates) were the ones winning all the races. Eventually, the other families stopped showing up and many families never even bothered getting into the Masters division. Their kids would race in the 2 lower divisions and then move on to other activities.
There was a few years when the 6 driver minimum at the weekend rallies couldn't be met. Instead of not racing, 1 or 2 fake names were placed on the grids so the other kids could race. Akron made believe that they didn't know what was going on for a while but eventually had no choice but to eliminate the customizations. It worked. It took a few years, but the Masters Division, while still the smallest division, is thriving now.
It still takes some expertise to build a good Masters car and it still cost more to build a good Masters car when compared to the lower divisions, but it's back to being within reach of almost all families that want to move up.
Electric Comet wrote in news:n1o07v$ore$1 @dont-email.me:
Well, 40-odd years of experience says there isn't an outside to that box. The last unlimited automobile race series was the Can-Am in the late 60s, early 70s. Which ended because it was simply too fast and too expensive.
Well, that would be another way to bring racing to an end. If there's no human in it, it's no longer a sporting competition, and spectator interest will rapidly approach zero.
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