Sportsman Council phone conference Tonight!

[Chris Williams]

Had two long chats with a local track operator here in the NW about the .370 vs. .400 question. He's run several tracks here and is very well respected. I'm interested in people's feedback on his comments.

He said there's no such thing as a ".370" tree. The software doesn't do that, that there's just .400 and .500 -- and, importantly, some compensation amounts (more later). The issue is the LED bulbs, which are proven to be about .030 faster than the incandescents. So a tree set at .400 with LED bulbs will look like an incandescent tree set to .370.

When NHRA shifted to LED bulbs because they are brighter and more reliable in the harsh conditions of the track, they also helped the bike drivers with their red light issues. And for fuel drivers (who are running .060 - .090 lights anyway) it doesn't really effect them.

Of course, as we sportsman know, it sent us for a loop. If you could just barely hit a .050 because your car doesn't react like that, you're now looking at .080s... terrible. And when you're running a Super class where a .010 vs a .020 light is often the difference between winning and losing, .030 is a lifetime.

But the LEDs initially were (still are?) really expensive. So not all tracks could afford them. The NHRA division directors carried around a set of the bulbs for divisional races. And slowly some tracks put them in. To solve the sportsman problem with the faster tree, they put .030 in the compensation factor in the software, resulting in a tree that was as fast as the old .400 incandescent tree.

The operative question is, who has the .030 compensation in the system and who doesn't. Is it in on a class-by-class basis? Is it in for National and Divisional events? How about on your local track on the average weekend race? Should it be?

I'm interested in a "BS" detection on this. Is this what you all understand the issue is? I'm just trying to understand this from a technical level and getting a lot of conflicting info.

Thanks,
Chris