Subaru Enthusiasts Car Club of the Sierras - View Single Post

sperry · 2003-04-07, 09:48 AM

Maybe I don't understand drag racing, but to me there seems to be two races going on: car vs. car and driver vs. driver.

In professional drag racing, cars car clasified, and everyone does all that they can while staying in their class. This results is, the cars are usually very equal, therefore emphasizing the driver vs. driver aspect.

However, on the street (where you shouldn't be racing anyway) and at open drag strips cars are basically unlimited, making the race very car vs. car oriented, i.e. who can take a certain platform and mod it out to be as fast as possible. To me these competitions are interesting from an engineering and car enthusiast standpoint. I like to see how different ways of going fast (say V10 RWD vs H4 turbo AWD) stack up against each other.

*Of course* a WRX with a skilled driver will beat a Viper if the driver of the Viper doesn't drive well, to the extreme I could beat a Viper on my mountain bike if he blew up the motor on the line, right? But in a car vs. car oriented setting, this doesn't mean the WRX is faster than the Viper. People seem to take pride that they "killed" some crazy fast car, when in fact they "killed" some crazy bad driver. Drivers being equal, for a WRX to beat a stock SRT-10, it's gonna take a crazy modified WRX.

I'd *love* to see a WRX get modded out to Viper performance levels, just beacuse the engineering needed to get it done is impressive. But I don't believe that a WRX beating a Viper, especially due to a bad Viper pilot, means that WRX's and Vipers are anywhere near the same class of car.

Looking for props for beating a bad driver doesn't count for much to me I guess. If the story was more like: "Well, I finally got my WRX pushing 30psi, and it dyno'd at 480hp to the wheels. So I went out to Fernly and took on a SRT-10, and beat him by a car length! We both had good launches, but my AWD tossed me in front and I was just able to hang on to the win, but man that Viper was coming stong." Now that's a story that earns my respect. That's a lot of hard work to tuning a car to run and beat a car that outclasses it in pretty much every way.

2003-04-07, 09:48 AM	#8
sperry The Doink Real Name: Scott Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Portland, OR Posts: 20,335 Car: '09 OBXT, '02 WRX, '96 Miata Class: PDX/TT-6 The way out is through	Maybe I don't understand drag racing, but to me there seems to be two races going on: car vs. car and driver vs. driver. In professional drag racing, cars car clasified, and everyone does all that they can while staying in their class. This results is, the cars are usually very equal, therefore emphasizing the driver vs. driver aspect. However, on the street (where you shouldn't be racing anyway) and at open drag strips cars are basically unlimited, making the race very car vs. car oriented, i.e. who can take a certain platform and mod it out to be as fast as possible. To me these competitions are interesting from an engineering and car enthusiast standpoint. I like to see how different ways of going fast (say V10 RWD vs H4 turbo AWD) stack up against each other. Of course a WRX with a skilled driver will beat a Viper if the driver of the Viper doesn't drive well, to the extreme I could beat a Viper on my mountain bike if he blew up the motor on the line, right? But in a car vs. car oriented setting, this doesn't mean the WRX is faster than the Viper. People seem to take pride that they "killed" some crazy fast car, when in fact they "killed" some crazy bad driver. Drivers being equal, for a WRX to beat a stock SRT-10, it's gonna take a crazy modified WRX. I'd love to see a WRX get modded out to Viper performance levels, just beacuse the engineering needed to get it done is impressive. But I don't believe that a WRX beating a Viper, especially due to a bad Viper pilot, means that WRX's and Vipers are anywhere near the same class of car. Looking for props for beating a bad driver doesn't count for much to me I guess. If the story was more like: "Well, I finally got my WRX pushing 30psi, and it dyno'd at 480hp to the wheels. So I went out to Fernly and took on a SRT-10, and beat him by a car length! We both had good launches, but my AWD tossed me in front and I was just able to hang on to the win, but man that Viper was coming stong." Now that's a story that earns my respect. That's a lot of hard work to tuning a car to run and beat a car that outclasses it in pretty much every way. __________________ Is you is, or is you ain't, my con-stit-u-ints?