[Kevin M]

Originally Posted by sperry

You're missing it.

It's like victory weight in Speed World Challenge: If I win, I get 50 lbs on the car for the next race. If I win again, I get another 50 lbs. Every time I do good, it gets harder for me to win next time. If I don't do good, then they take weight off the car.

So, if you're in a class killer car in autocross, once you win a few events, you've got an X second "handicap" (not really the best term) making it harder for you to continue winning, or more accurately, making it easier for the rest of the field to catch you. The idea is the field is self leveling over the course of a season, so things like class killer cars, street tire PAX inequalities, etc are automatically self-corrected.

The problem is that driver ability will also get "self-corrected" by this method. i.e. A driver that would beat everyone up in a single car challenge will have their driving ability handicapped away as well. That's why this sort of handicapping is popular in road racing because when done right you end up with a field of cars that are all about the same speed, so you get close racing which attracts sponsors. That's not the issue in autocross. We're not looking for a bunch of people to have identical lap times, we're looking to eliminate unfairness due to rules... victory weight is exactly the opposite of that... it's intentional unfairness via rules.

So I did get it, because I think it's not something that's applicable to autocross. We want the better driver on any given day to win, regardless of his car and equipment, right? Not parity.