In another post .... Mike Eakin commented ...
.OBTW, many letters are requests to make a rule change in order for a one-off car to be given some allowance to be more competitive. "My car is a poor design and is 2 seconds slower than the field. Could you please give all Zebra 200s a 50 pound weight break?" Those sort of letters.
Hopefully someone on some committee or board can explain who and why this crazy rule change occurred. At some point, someone slipped in a rule that FFs running the European floor rules and wide side pods had to run a 25 lb weight penalty. What? FRP and then SCCA decided to allow cars with wide pods from outside the US to race without having to totally reconfigure the cars to the SCCA rules. It was an attempt to be more inclusive, and not drive up the cost to race cars that were totally compromised with 20% more frontal area and much more compromised floor rules. I spent $1000s of dollars putting SCCA-legal narrow pods on several cars with the wide pods, as the wide pods and restricted floor rules, were clearly a performance handicap.
Whoever signed off on adding a weight penalty to these cars should be shot. It is about the most stupid competition adjustment ever in SCCA, and that is saying something! Someone with an agenda that clearly was not about fair competition managed to slide this by. Anyone who believes these big ugly pods are generating advantageous downforce has been conned.
Somebody needs to fix this mistake. We want people to spend their money going to races, not being forced to remove safety features while making their cars faster, so they can shed a 25 lb handicap.