Originally Posted by sperry
Since I wasn't involved in the original conversation about this topic, I thought I'd share my thoughts with the group regarding the question of keeping, dropping, or modifying the PAX championship. Hopefully I'm not so long winded that no one can get through this long letter.
First, in order to analize this stituation we have to ask ourselves "what is the point of the PAX Championship?" In my opinion, the PAX Championship is represents exactly what it's titled... the "PAX Champion" is the driver that finished with the highest total of PAX points for the season. Since I've been around the region long enough, I know there are some issue with PAX (both philosophically, and specifically due to our region's altitude), and I know that when someone like Mike Mulhall finishes in the top 10 it's probably more impressive than someone like Mike Khamis winning it outright due to the cars and PAX factors involved. But in my opinion, that's not what the championship is about. The championship is about PAX, including all the flaws inherrent in the system.
Having learned some more history of the club tonight, I now realize that while I've been here long enough to appreciate (and some would argue, capitalize on) the issues of a PAX competition at our altitude, I haven't been here long enough to appreciate that many members in the region consider the PAX Championship to be more of a "Driver of the Year" award, since it's that award that it was specifically created to replace. In that light, I understand there is much more at stake than simply being crowned "the best in PAX", and I understand the argument that we should drop the PAX championship because the standings don't accurately reflect what the de facto "meaning" of the award is in the hearts and minds of the region's members, which is actually more along the lines "Driver of the Year" or "Best Driver in the Region".
So we're left with a dilemma that seems to have only several options:
- Leave the award as it is. The argument is that PAX, while not totally accurate, is the best available method for transparently selecting the regions best drivers.
- Drop the award entirely. The argument being that if the PAX championship can't accurately represent the "region's best driver", then we simply shouldn't attempt to crown anyone as such.
- Modify the award in some way. One posibility is to downplay the award and attempt to make it mean only "best PAX driver" and not "best driver", perhaps by awarding it 1st so as to hype the class trophies more. Another is to return the award to a selection by committee method, where PAX points are only part of the picture. Or finally we could modify PAX to better reflect our region so the award more accurately reflects "best driver" over "best PAX".
Looking at our options, I see nothing that will truely solve our situation.
- We can't leave the award as it is, because it simply doesn't mean what the region's members expect it to mean.
- We could drop the award, but the region seems to certainly want a "Driver of the Year" type award even with the additional in-class competition we expect to generate with the new Street Tire rules. In addition, a PAX championship is essentially a "free" championship that everyone can participate in in addition to their class championship. I'd hate to lose an element of competition, just because we can't agree upon what it means.
- Downplaying the award only offers lip-service to the problem, and won't solve the situation unless we can somehow change the perception of the members.
- Picking "Driver of the Year" by vote not only opens the floodgates for "political" issues within the club, it also seems to run contrary to the whole point of competative motorsports: "the winner is the person that crosses the finish line first". If you numerically win PAX, but have the award given to the second place person because of a vote, how legitimate is that champion? At least with the current PAX championship, each driver can clearly see how the champion was selected, (and they should clearly see the flaws in the PAX method as well).
- Changing the way PAX is calculated opens a whole new (actually old) can of worms; ...how do we do our own PAX? ...is it fair? No matter what we try to do, I guarentee the PAX factors will be a point of contention if they're generated within the region. In my opinion the current 3rd party generated PAX factors are flawed, but not easily improved upon. Having a member or committe that competes in the region will undermine the "officialness" of a PAX champion due to the implications that there may be alterior motivation behind the selection of the factors.
Since the possibilities above don't seem to present a solution, allow me to propose another option. Hopefully one that will take all the advantages of the above solutions and blend them in a way to provide the region with the satistfaction of knowing who the best driver(s) are, as well as be completely transparent from the start of the season to the end.
Here's my suggestion:
- Classes are grouped into several "PAX Groups" with the intent of placing the cars less effected by altitude together, and the cars more effected by altitude together.
- PAX Groups are scored each as their own PAX Championship.
- At the end of the season, the PAX Group that generated the closest competition (as determined by some calculation based on number of competitors and tightness of the competition) becomes *the* PAX Group, the winner of which will be the overall PAX Champion. (Think of each PAX group as being a Bowl Game, but only one Bowl Game is the National Championship game.)
- If we're really clever, the PAX Groups will match the Run Groups (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow), allowing us to watch the PAX competitions per group throughout the day. I think with the Novice program's flexibility and the changed to street tire, we should be able to balance run groups per event if the main classes are more firmly pre-scheduled.
This solution retains the transparency of scoring that the current PAX rules have. It also attempts to equalize the competition but at a granularity that prevents the nightmare developing our own PAX factors would be. It adds several PAX champions, so that even if I don't win the title of "PAX Champion" I can still say "hey, I won the Rose Bowl at least!".
However, the difficulty in this system is two fold. First, the organization of classes is critical, and will certainly be a point of contention. Second, this system is much more complicated, and will be hard for timing and scoring without some specially designed software (I am certainly willing to write at least a post-event parser that will recalculate event results into the format we need), and it may be hard for all the members to understand, since it's not as totally straight forward as the current PAX rules.
Off the top of my head here's how I would organize the classes based on their altitude disadvantage. This is just a 1st pass, and would certainly need a lot of discussion, especially since I have very little feel for the cars in the Modified and Prepared classes.
Low altitude disadvantage:
SS, DS, FS
ASP, BSP, ESP
STU, SM, SM2, SU
AP, BP, CP
F125, FJ*
Altitude neutral:
AS, BS, GS, HS
DSP
STS, STX
FP
AM, BM, CM, DM
FSAE, FSCCA
High altitude disadvantage:
CS, ES
CSP, FSP
STS2
DP, EP
EM, FM
Then grouping them into four PAX Groups, again these will need plenty of discussion, as I've attempted to organize by car type with altitude disadvantage considerations, and it doesn't seem to work all that well, especially for run balancing:
RED (race/sports cars, low altitude disadvantage, think "Corvette"):
SS, AS, BS
ASP, BSP
SM2
AP, BP
AM, BM
F125, FJ*, FSAE, FSCCA
BLUE (race/sports cars, high altitude disadvantage, think "Miata"):
CS, ES
CSP, FSP
DP
CM, DM, EM, FM
GREEN (sedans/street cars, low altitude disadvantage, think "STI"):
DS, FS, GS
ESP
STU, SM, SU
CP
YELLOW (sedans/street cars, high altitude disadvantage, think "Civic"):
HS
DSP
STS2
EP, FP
Finally, the calculation for determining "competativeness" will need to be creative and obvious. I don't have anything in mind outside of using the number of competitors in a PAX Group coupled with the "tightness" of the scores. i.e. a group with 10% of the drivers within 50 points of the leader is more competative than a group with only 4% of the drivers within 50 points of the leader. There may also need to be something that relates the median PAX results from group to group, so someone that runs away with a group won't be penalized because everyone else in their group totally sucks. This may be a problem I'll need to run by a mathmatician at IGT. :-)
And with that, I'm spent... I'm sure everyone will have an opinion on what classes belong where. The nice thing is that by organizing the classes with respect to the region will hopefully be less of a chore than attempting to define our own PAX factors, as well as be less of a point of contention.
I'm of course open to suggestions, and would actually like it if someone with more experience and better class knowledge (ahem, John, Dave) would take this and run with it, if this seems to be a viable alternative to the previously proposed PAX solutions. And if you think this is a total bunk idea, feel free to tell me that too so I stop wasting my time thinking about it! ;-)
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