Why aren't there more Formula cars out there?

[TimH]

There are still ways to buy yourself into endurance racing, but you'll still need at least one guy on your team who probably came up through karts - that training is just too darned good and there's no substitute for an extra decade or two of wheel-to-wheel competition.

None of my kids were good (or driven) enough to make the step up from city league/YMCA to club soccer at an early age, which means they topped out at middle school JVs.

Oh, and Mario could drive anything with wheels like maybe nobody else but Jimmy Clark, well into an advanced age.

That's not to say he had that much more fun than those of us in the middle of the vintage FF pack.

[Rick Kirchner]

the greats - they drove everything and drove it well. Front engine Indy, rear engine Indy, LeMans, TransAm, Off-road, snowmobiles, Sprints, Stock Cars.....

Guys today are pretty much specialists.

[Pragmatist]

Here's something to think about, I raced FV back in the eighty's (That's Formula Vee for the new guys) and just recently thought about getting back in. I wasn't locked into FV but wanted an open wheeled racecar. In just this discussion alone folks have used designations for cars, clubs, and series that to a new or returning driver make no sense. I can appreciate jargon but you can't imagine copying and pasting and searching for FBLW or any of the other combinations only to find a flower or some government department. Also finding Apex was just a lucky accident....

[TimH]

I can appreciate jargon but you can't imagine copying and pasting and searching for FBLW or any of the other combinations only to find a flower or some government department. Also finding Apex was just a lucky accident....

You're in the wrong forum - this one is set aside for us all to bxtch about car counts.

For much more useful information go to https://www.apexspeed.com/forums/for...etting-Started

FV is still plenty active in some areas, CF (Club Ford) for newer than vintage FFs is a hoot, FC (Formula Continental) is seeing a resurgence, and then there are many less popular choices that might suit you.

[Marshall Mauney]

I bought my Star Formula Mazda one year ago. besides SCCA, vintage, and a few FRP events I don't know how I can race it. And track days/test & tune? Without being with a race weekend, I don't see many options in the Midwest for open wheel at all, racing or track days for practice/testing.

Why are you restricting yourself to local events? If you're driving a car at that level, why not treat it like a ladder series and run Super Tour and Majors events over a wider distance?

You'll see a lot of the same people racing at the June Sprints as you see at Watkins Glen, VIR, Mid-Ohio, etc.

Next, how many events are you wanting to run per year? One of the challenges is the budget, and my experience was that most drivers intend to run 8-10 or fewer race weekends per year. The sanctioning groups try to set up their event counts to get the most people per race, so that it's a more consistent and larger field at each event. Yes, this means fewer race weekends, but keeps attendance up, which makes the racing better. If a given class has 20 local cars, each of which is going to run 6 events, going past 8 events in the area is going to dilute car counts and make the class feel weak due to smaller grids each event.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but open wheel cars are expensive to operate. If you really want to be competitive, you're going to spend a bunch of money on tires to be at the front each and every weekend. Would you rather have 5 weekends running around on hard, used tires, or 2 running on fresh rubber?

[Will Horn]

Lots of great discussion across this thread, it's helpful to see the ideas and think of how to influence or mitigate some of these requirements, or if and where that may be possible beyond current norms.

Here's something to think about, I raced FV back in the eighty's (That's Formula Vee for the new guys) and just recently thought about getting back in. I wasn't locked into FV but wanted an open wheeled racecar. In just this discussion alone folks have used designations for cars, clubs, and series that to a new or returning driver make no sense. I can appreciate jargon but you can't imagine copying and pasting and searching for FBLW or any of the other combinations only to find a flower or some government department. Also finding Apex was just a lucky accident....

Working in tech, I use acronyms and domain specific terms constantly, and someone recently introduced me to the term "gatekeeping language". There's also common observation that "ubiquitous language" makes getting things done easier, with people or code.

This is great feedback about "gatekeeping language" to me and maybe points to an acronym glossary and/or other lookup tool here that makes finding related items faster and more clear.

Also thanks for finding the site - feel free to pm me to chat about any of it, I'd love to know that fortunate accident that brought you here!

[E1pix]

I’d love to see people use their language skills again, and take five more bloody seconds to just post in English. :-)

I’m sure to lose my mind if ever seeing GLWSTTSINTBT.
(Good luck with sale though the seller is not to be trusted)

Welcome, and Thanks.

[JoshuaJustice]

Here's my take on why there aren't more formula cars. I'll drop a numbered list in here.

1. Ability to get on track. This is massive, and affects SRF and prototypes as well. Any kind of tintop is welcome at any track day, with varying rules on whether or not you need a roll bar or a full cage. If you've got a fully caged tintop, you can run pretty much anything. If it's not a national class you can't run Super Tours, but you can run Majors/Regionals in regional classes in SCCA; and you can run whatever in Gridlife or NASA, and you can get on track at any HPDE org in the country. Meanwhile, most HPDE orgs reject formula cars outright, and the only way to get on track in many parts of the country is to pay for a country-club membership at a club which has open-wheel lapping sessions. There are a handful of HPDE orgs (e.g. Edge Addict's Track Rats session) which have a completely open session for any car, but this is often restricted to people who have already done some track days with the organization to get out of their "intro" tier, which requires spending money doing it with something with a passenger seat but even these are often not as much track time as you'd get doing the regular session with the HPDE org.
2. Modern formula cars have comically high up-front costs. The F4 and F3 are ridiculous. You can get older Formula cars with lower costs up front, but the maintenance is an issue. So you're forced to choose between an absurdly expensive car, an obsolete (vintage) car, or a major project. (Or two of the three!)
3. Formula cars require you to either be a mechanic yourself or pay through the nose for a shop to work on your car. And "being a mechanic yourself" is an untenable goal for most people, because it requires a garage. Renting a garage that is powered to work on a car is expensive as hell, and getting a house to get a garage is a massive hurdle to clear right now with housing prices being what they are. Go look at Zillow and look at what's happened to housing prices since 2015 or so. Then on top of that, you've got to deal with an increasing number of HOAs that forbid working on your car on your own property. (Why anyone is willing to sign on to an HOA that restrictive is beyond me, but that's a rant for a different forum.) Obviously the people living in apartments aren't going to be keeping a formula car in the parking deck. So you're left with paying a shop to work on your car, and that's expensive as hell... if you can even find one. Which brings me to the next point.
4. The absolute mismanagement of formula car classes by SCCA has completely obliterated formula car racing in large swaths of the country. There's FRP on the east coast and Left Coast on the west coast, and... that's it. Sure, those guys double-dip in SCCA. In Texas? Well, let's see, other than Formula Mazda doing their own thing in the FX class here, there's nothing. FV and FF have all but completely ditched SCCA to go vintage racing. There's a couple guys running in FA, but outside of FX (which is really just FM with maybe a stray F4 car here and there) the "Wings and Things" run group might as well just be a bunch of dudes who gatecrash a SCCA race weekend to run a track day (see item #1). Whatever decisions may or may not have been reasonable at the time, the end result is they've obliterated those classes. And you can see this in numbers over time in the formula car classes in the rest of the country as well.
5. As for vintage? Not to put too fine a point on it, but when I rent a Vee from Bigger Hammer and run a CVAR race, I'm one of the youngest people in the paddock. Vintage racing is predominantly staffed by vintage drivers, who have already solved the "how do I get a car and work on it" problem. The Vee driving school in CVAR is pretty much the only "fresh blood" in the vintage racing scene, and those people are just renting. If they do buy a Vee, they generally wind up racing it with Bigger Hammer or Barron, which means they're just paying a shop to do most if not all the work (item #3).
6. People absolutely sit on FVs and FFs because they put huge amounts of money into them over the years with upkeep and maintenance but they only sell for $2-8k (FV) and $10-20k (FF). So they sit in the garage unsold until the owner is no longer with us, and the widow or kids sell the chassis and it's a total ordeal to get the car race-ready again. Of course, a large part of the reason they sell for such low amounts is they're uncompetitive in modern SCCA (see #4) and are basically only relevant because of vintage eligibilty - but the problem is, Vintage racing is mostly people who've already got a car! And I think it's quite fair to say that buying a vintage formula car for your first racecar is an odd choice, especially because of the difficulty in getting track time (item #1).

If you want to get formula cars raced more widely, here's some suggestions:
1. Get FRP (or some other org) to expand beyond just the two coasts and get races and non-competitive track days for formula cars in place in the rest of the country. Partner with something else if you must, but it's got to have a reasonable amount of track time that a novice can actually drive and get up to speed, not two sessions a day.
2. Figure out some way to fix the formula car classing problem and make it so the older cars aren't just completely obsolete. Nobody likes showing up and being relegated to running in the back no matter how hard they drive. This might mean borrowing the FF1/FF2/FF3 notion from vintage, making separate classes for modern FFs, whatever - but it needs to simultaneously give people a group to race with while also making it where the classes aren't so obnoxiously specific that everyone who shows up is in 2-3 car classes. Dunno where to even begin with the winged cars.
3. RENTALS RENTALS RENTALS. There's a reason I've driven a FV and not a FF, and that's because I can't find anyone who has a FF for rent around here (probably because they're all vintage guys driving their own things and not shops making a business out of it). Stuff like Skip Barber is fine for the people trying to do the formula car career ladder, but for a weekend hobbyist the price is insane, and there's no need for "literal F4 car" to be the place to go to start learning.
4. Get shops in place to support formula cars, and they need to have websites (and be linked from the org website) so they can be found. Word of mouth only goes so far, and doesn't work for literal beginners trying to figure out how to even get started. The websites don't have to be fancy, a Wix dealio is fine, but it needs to be kept up to date and the listing of shops on the race org website needs to be up to date.
5. It is the current year, do some social media promotion on instagrams and youtube shorts and whatever the hell the kids get up to next. If you run a race shop and are actually trying to grow the business (and you've already got a website that isn't an abandoned blight on the internet from a decade ago), please find someone under the age of 40 and throw them a couple hundred bucks' discount each weekend to edit together some video and schedule a bunch of social media posts using Hootsuite or something.


(I admit there is a "chicken and egg" problem with race orgs and race shops. Making a race shop with no org to race in would be a quick recipe to bankruptcy, and a race org with no cars to race in it is pointless.)

[brian styczynski]

I disagree with you with young people in vintage racing. There are a surprising number of people getting into vintage FV in their 20s and early 30s. There is less nepotism in vintage vs scca FV IMO, so you see younger people who don't already have family racing in FV. It makes sense due to affordabilty, nice field sizes and ability to do most of the prep work with a little know how and tools. The old guys are a valuable resource, they are more than happy to help new people out with tips and a spare part. Well populated regional classes will always draw the people looking to get into the sport, so I think CVAR, VSCDA, RMVR, etc. will continue to have success as older guys phase out. The younger people in vintage racing may be FV specific though, other guys in the paddock seem jealous that FV always gets the young people to the driver schools as opposed to another retiree finding a new hobby, but see all the points you made above.

[FVRacer21]

We have about 40 drivers in the NEFV group, Challenge cup has about the same a little further west, strong vintage groups in TX and the Midwest. Driverz Cup in Florida trying to build up.

If you wait for the SCCA to fix something - it will not happen. A group has to take the bull by the horns and make it happen.

Right now FV is probably the only entry level formula class. FF used to be, but got lost along the way. Vintage does not help. In the 1990's Club ford was growing until the vintage guys around the world found all of the good ones.....

There were several attempts by Honda and Suzuki to build inexpensive non-wing formula cars - and they would have dominated! Killed FV , F6 and FF in one fell swoop. Don't ask me why, but never followed through like Legends Cars did....

ChrisZ

[JoshuaJustice]

Speaking of F6, car counts seem to be up for F6 at Super Tours. Is there a F6-specific reason we don't see them at the Majors much? I got to look at one up close and thought the chain drive thing was kinda weird and the tires pretty small, but on the surface it seems like a straightforward next step from karting...

@Brian: yes, Vintage FV specifically seems to be a place where younger people can get in (at least in some areas) but I don't think that's a viable long-term solution as long as it's hamstrung by the requirement to be vintage-authentic. Those parts will eventually start running out...

[problemchild]

I really don't understand this discussion. There is a clear path to Pro racing. Karts to Lucas Racing Series to F1600 to Road to Indy. Costs 2-3 million dollars but is proven. The recent Indy 500 winner a variation of this path. Going directly to a PFM and running club/vintage events is a path to nowhere. Sorry to be blunt but that is the truth!

[Brian Graham]

Joshua I was with you on most of your points but the "Formula cars require you to either be a mechanic yourself or pay through the nose for a shop to work on your car." seems a bit much. I run a prep shop and charge what I think is a very fair rate to work on customer cars. Heck, I pay double what I charge to have someone work on my road cars.

If it were not for prep shops I think the fields would be smaller. FRP provides what drivers want with single class racing. There are simply too many classes for SCCA to do that.

Brian

[brian styczynski]

I really don't understand this discussion. There is a clear path to Pro racing. Karts to Lucas Racing Series to F1600 to Road to Indy. Costs 2-3 million dollars but is proven. The recent Indy 500 winner a variation of this path. Going directly to a PFM and running club/vintage events is a path to nowhere. Sorry to be blunt but that is the truth!

Sure, but some of us are just trying to get on track as a hobby, get in an open wheel car that can be competitive and affordable without planning to work their way up the ladder starting in their 20s or 30s (or 50s).

[Jerry Kehoe]

Having raced Formula cars for over 50 years in everything from FF, F5000, FA, Vintage F1, etc I contend that Formula cars or Sports Racers are far easier for anyone to maintain than any production car. First of all they are generally over designed for their purpose unlike production based with most components that were designed for street use and have to be worked over to be even strong enough for racing stresses and if broken generally have to be replaced by factory parts instead of being fabricated somewhat simply. They brake properly and good, gearboxes are generally trouble free, tube frame or tub cars are fixable, one man can manhandle the bodywork, and if maintained with common sense are easily maintained by yourself! SCCA has now about 20 different classes confusing the Hell out of anyone to figure out anything. When I started there was FV,FF, FA, B,C, now, A thru Z !

[JoshuaJustice]

Joshua I was with you on most of your points but the "Formula cars require you to either be a mechanic yourself or pay through the nose for a shop to work on your car." seems a bit much. I run a prep shop and charge what I think is a very fair rate to work on customer cars. Heck, I pay double what I charge to have someone work on my road cars.

I want to be clear, I'm not saying prep shop rates are unfair or a ripoff - the shops I've seen have fair rates - just that it's expensive when you're in the position of having to do everything through a prep shop because of the garage situation.

[problemchild]

Sure, but some of us are just trying to get on track as a hobby, get in an open wheel car that can be competitive and affordable without planning to work their way up the ladder starting in their 20s or 30s (or 50s).

Yes I was one of those for decades. But that is a disconnect to some of the discussion on this thread. There was once a day where you could start in FV or FF club racing and "make it". Not today. That would be like taking up the accordion with the goal of becoming a rock star.

I find working on formula cars pretty basic but would be intimidated working on modern tin tops. There is no doubt that there is misconceptions, both ways. I once sold a FV to a tin-top racer who did all the bodywork and paintwork with the body on the car. It never occurred to them that the body panels cane off.