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Mustang GT4 European Debut

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I’ll try and watch this later this weekend.
 
The commentary is in French so you might need a beer or two to get through it. But multiple times you'll hear "Maxwell Ford Performance" and your ears perk up!


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JDee

Ancient Racer
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Entered by Multimatic and driven by Scott Maxwell

The car looked very unsettled around Paul Ricard...



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Watched this while waiting for the wrecking to start at 'Dega, LOL. Scott was running 1st in AM class and in the 10 top overall when the car broke, happens at around the 37 minute mark. Not sure what happened, looked like something dragging in the right front. I don't get the classing of this car/driver combo as AM, I've watched Scott race, and occasionally raced with him, well, that may be overstating it, was on track in the same race as him, since the late 80s and as far as I know he's always made his living as a racer. Given how tough Euro racing is though it looked like a decent start for the Mustang GT4. Big field of cars, they had 32 GT4 cars and in IMSA they get maybe 8 or 10 of these cars and not many more in PWC. Thanks for posting that.
 
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well....IMSA says they're selling a buttload of these for their competition, but if say "someone" did inquire..just saying, they could slide you into one in about a month, so I'm not sure if this grand GT4 spec thing is hype or not.
Clearly, I'm biased, I think it's totally un american not to build your own race car, then get BoP'd at whim, whenever you are successful. I mean they "dinged" us between Fridays and Saturdays races in St. Pete with a restrictor change..no warning.
Like Joe Aquilante calls it "socialized racing"...

http://sportscar365.com/lemans/wec/oreca-feels-unfairly-penalized-in-lmp2-joker-allowances/
 
well....IMSA says they're selling a buttload of these for their competition, but if say "someone" did inquire..just saying, they could slide you into one in about a month, so I'm not sure if this grand GT4 spec thing is hype or not.
Clearly, I'm biased, I think it's totally un american not to build your own race car, then get BoP'd at whim, whenever you are successful. I mean they "dinged" us between Fridays and Saturdays races in St. Pete with a restrictor change..no warning.
Like Joe Aquilante calls it "socialized racing"...

http://sportscar365.com/lemans/wec/oreca-feels-unfairly-penalized-in-lmp2-joker-allowances/

Completely agree and thumbs-upping your post for linking back to the Oreca merry-goround

I think it was during the Road Atlanta broadcast that Creamer said there had been 14 produced to date...

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ChrisM

Mostly harmless.
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South Carolina
well....IMSA says they're selling a buttload of these for their competition, but if say "someone" did inquire..just saying, they could slide you into one in about a month, so I'm not sure if this grand GT4 spec thing is hype or not.
Clearly, I'm biased, I think it's totally un american not to build your own race car, then get BoP'd at whim, whenever you are successful. I mean they "dinged" us between Fridays and Saturdays races in St. Pete with a restrictor change..no warning.
Like Joe Aquilante calls it "socialized racing"...

http://sportscar365.com/lemans/wec/oreca-feels-unfairly-penalized-in-lmp2-joker-allowances/

Socialized racing, I like that. Next they'll make the podium one height and everyone gets to stand on it.
 
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Well when we ran the Porsche in GT we had a real good engineer from Germany, our driver out qualified the factory car by a couple of thousandths but we were around 9th on the grid. So we're all looking around at some way to make the car faster and he says relax, we're done. The crew is looking around like what the heck. He says we out qualified the factory car and all the rest of the Porsches in the class and that was as good as it gets. But..we're in 9th. Until they change the BoP that's where we'll be...
Sadly, he's right.
Everything on the car is part numbered, you're limited in chassis adjustments, it's not like you can take a hole saw and wang out the upper strut towers to get more camber because that's illegal...you're just stuck until you're allowed to go fast again.
 
had to ask.... whats a BoP??

Balance of Performance....

Essentially the sanctioning body (IMSA/WEC/PWC/etc.) will put limitations or relieve limitations from a particular chassis to balance the competition. The objective is to limit a run-away car. The BoP can change race by race, year by year, and I've even seen from session to session.

Lots of reasons why some see it as "good" and others see it as "bad". You see a lot of politics and lobbying come into play around BoP.




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It also leads to a lot of sandbagging mid season, Camaro usually comes out strong, gets BoPd, strokes it through mid season to look pathetic, get the blessings and then run the table the last few races.

That and the Stevenson driver pairing was basically Pro-Pro (but so was Multimatic admittedly with Maxwell/Johnson).

IMO it really detracts from the intent of the series to have such heavy manufacturer involvement leading to essentially factory teams. Which is also why I am bummed about ST going away for TCR. The ST class produces some of the fiercest "grassroots" style wheel to wheel racing.

Same could be said about MSR and some others in GTD at the moment...


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JDee

Ancient Racer
1,797
2,001
Exp. Type
W2W Racing
Exp. Level
20+ Years
5 miles from Mosport
That and the Stevenson driver pairing was basically Pro-Pro (but so was Multimatic admittedly with Maxwell/Johnson).

IMO it really detracts from the intent of the series to have such heavy manufacturer involvement leading to essentially factory teams. Which is also why I am bummed about ST going away for TCR. The ST class produces some of the fiercest "grassroots" style wheel to wheel racing.

Same could be said about MSR and some others in GTD at the moment...


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Totally agree. When I read they were going to factory race cars for ST I thought there goes the last class where a small team could build their own car. Wonder how long it will be before PWC does similar with TC, TCA and TCB. That's sad, building race cars used to be all about innovation, doing things differently and finding something the other guy missed. Now it's just going to be buy a factory race car and hope that you get blessed with BoP goodness or that you have enough factory clout to whine and cry for BoP goodness. It's way too easy for a sanctioning body to pick and crown a winnah. Not a fan of this kind of racing.
 
I'm not trying to defend any of this but keep in mind one of the goals of trying to equalize the cars is cost containment.

Correct

I'll play hypocrite here [emoji16] - I see the appeal of the shop-built racer and understand the reasoning and cost control initiatives behind factory build cars....

This is 90% the reason behind me purchasing the FR500S over several other shop cars I drove - the build quality is a know quantity, it's built with mostly parts bin kit, and the documentation on the car (setup, maintenance, etc.) is available from Ford. Not much left for me to think about other than driving.


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Well, I've heard that before, but the Phoenix car at SPGP was built from a salvage title and could be sold for 140K, the GT4 is around 220K last I heard, that's not cost containment. Also, Phoenix, when they were the Subaru factory team, designed built, developed the car from the chassis plate to the winner's circle, so where do you draw the line on "shop" cars. Also the GT4 parts have to bought from the manufacturer, further driving up costs if they don't have the magic part number. Jacking the prices of cars and parts just covers the cost of paying the organizer to play, since the manufacturer is not going to just absorb that money. Not only that but the engines have to go back to the factory and cannot be maintained by the racer, easy to tech, hard to pay for.
 

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