I have taken your advice and asked them. I spent part of my morning on the phone calling CRB members. No one from the CRB said that your car was legal. They also did not say that it was illegal. I suspect that you heard what you wanted to hear.
Their phone numbers are on the SCCA website if anyone else wants to call them and ask.
Again, their task was to go and observe the car and report back. That is what they did.
I am going to repeat something that has been said multiple times and is clear in the GCR, but seems to be often forgotten: The CRB's mission is not to determine the legality of cars or the interpretation of the rules. Their mission is to help write the rules.
I believe that the Radon manufacturers misunderstood this and it helped lead to a lot of their problems. See the following post:
http://apexspeed.com/forums/showpost...&postcount=118
Communicating with a CRB member is not usually a bad idea, unless you get one who is not well versed in the rules, which I believe is what happened here. But, it is incredibly important to remember that the opinion of that CRB member on whether or not something is legal carries
no weight. The COA is in charge of rules interpretations. Period. A CRB member's opinion is no more important or binding than the opinion of any other member of this forum. Having stacks of emails from a former CRB member is as meaningless as any post on this forum.
Look at the COA opinion given regarding the floor on the Speads' chassis, also in this month's fastrack. Without knowing the exact content of any letter(email?) that Gomberg sent to Mr. Schader, it appears that Mr. Schader fell into the exact same mistake as the Radon guys.
Note the language used by the SCCA in fastrack(emphasis mine):
Mr. Schader appears to be in a very similar situation to the Radon guys. He built a car that was not legal to the 2012 GCR. Although he had been competing with it, passed annual tech, and had a log book, his car was still not legal. I wonder why the Radon seems to have been treated differently than the Speads?
Given his recent behavior, he does not appear to have moved on at all. Just because things have not been on apexspeed does not mean that things have not been happening.
I believe that my post #116 makes it clear that the Radon relies on "non-ferrous" including carbon fiber as it is stated by two Radon builders. But, here is the question that I asked in my compliance review regarding the meaning of non-ferrous.
Are there any questions about what this question asks or what the rules interpretation from the COA means? This is not vehicle specific, it is a very generic question regarding FF/FC construction.
I understand that it is just 7 cars and that Radon has put them and the SCCA in a very hard spot, but that could be a dangerous precedent. I don't look forward at all to a possibility of ending up with a class with competition adjustments. At what point do we start to expect people to own up to their decisions? We have a place in the club for them to participate, right now, without making any changes. I think that we should not let people show up with their car and dictate what class they choose to run in by threatening lawsuits. The SCCA has classes and I do not think it unreasonable to expect people to compete in the class where their car fits.
Under the 2012 rules the car was going to need a new chassis, or at least major chassis mods and to replace the side panels and shock mount with aluminum or tubes. Under the 2013 rules the Radon only needs to replace the carbon with an aluminum bracket.
Nathan's claim in his rules clarification request from 2010 was that he had a completed design for making the side panels from aluminum and had even gone so far as to get quotes on having the parts made ($1,720 per panel). Do we really want to rewrite the rule book to allow in cars that were never compliant over such a relatively small amount? Jim has claimed in this thread (post #70) that it would require extensive mods, but there have been a lot of false claims lately and it has become quite hard to discern truth from fiction.
Correct. I received confirmation this morning that the new spec line for the Radon requires them to be compliant with the 2012 GCR.