ST5/6 Rule change

[Desain21]

Hello,

I compete in TT with FL and SE region. I wanted to bring attention to a classing penalty that provides an unfair advantage to only certain cars. 
 

The -0.5 A arm penalty is the only penalty that affects a non-modified section of car performance. Cars either have it or don’t and the ones that don’t are not under any competitive disadvantage when it comes to camber gain under compression. Penalties should really only be addressed for items the owner has changed to the vehicle. 
 

That said for 2024, I would suggest it fair to reduce the scope of the penalty to -.2 or eliminate all together in conjunction with removing penalty for OEM MK60 ABS. 
 

Please let me know your thoughts. 

[Tansar_Motorsports]

As a driver of an A-arm car, I disagree.

Double A-arm is a superior suspension design to McPherson strut, and offers competitive advantages.

cars should absolutely take penalties based on their OEM design.  otherwise, we should all just be driving Boxster / Elise if we wanted to win.

The current rules do a good job of enabling FWD, RWD, front engine, mid engine, etc cars to compete against each other.  It could always be better, but its also an impossible task.

 

That being said, the current suspension penalty rules are too simplistic, and unfairly penalizes some cars while not penalizing some others that it should.

1. front and rear axles should be separated and penalized individually (0.3 front, 0.2 rear, for example)

2. modern "multilink" rear suspension needs to be penalized the same way double A-arm is, since it offers the same advantages in wheel control precision.
the only difficulty here is determining how to define what constitutes a modern multilink.  For example, does an e46 take penalty for its rear suspension?  Its sort of a multilink, but its also sort of a trailing arm.

3. the penalty for replacing a torsion bar with a coilover spring needs to be deleted.  the torsion bar setup would actually have less unsprung weight, so it would be superior, so why the penalty.  the coilover spring just makes ride height adjustment / corner balancing / changing your spring rate easier and far cheaper.