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Eric

I have no desire to see you lose your job, you are guiding this class through a very diffcult period. You can never make everyone happy, but this is the still the best racing bang for the buck around.

G H W Bush was a RINO

Because of my extreme conservative views and my wife's concern that men in black suits are going to come wisk me away in the middle of the night if I don't keep my mouth shut, I am not permitted to make political comments. Hence the rolling eyes.

All said, I HOPE that our CSR's, us and tranny rebuilders have some say on what direction we go with this issue. I will vote (even though my vote doesn't count) on gearing for reliability, longevity, availability, cost down the road, closer to our range of shifting to the current 1.9 setup. Otherwise, there is no use in having our current 5th gear ratio. This "volatile" discussion is important and it would be nice to have more voices out there from other CSR's and customers voice your opinions. Thanks guys!

Perhaps we have other ideas / options...that you are unaware of... for the 3-7 year time frame.

Again, I have no desire to rebuild my tranny, then find out another option would be in the wings.

Ok Good Morning!

Catching up…Lee, my Dad is slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, so I use the “ready my lips” with a heavy heart over how that all ended for Bush. Eye rolling makes sense! I missed a few smiley’s myself.

I highlighted the correct word in a previous post “3.85 was not ADDED”. Mr. Vultaggio says don’t chose without data. As I have said numerous times we decided not to add, and that was based on not having data. Ironically those stoking the flames have their mind made up; it is their logic that should be questioned. It would be far more foolish to choose between two options with no data. So why announce “not adding” the 3.85 now. Because many of the R&D partner’s cars were parked (they stopped testing for us) due to the hope they could build or rebuild their transmissions with the final choice. Additionally I received numerous customers’ inquiries with a panic tone to know right now, today.

How did we get here?

1. Mike Davies was investigating gearing options and obsolescence issues simultaneously. Helping to reassure me that we had a viable transmission without change and also making sure the GEN3 operated the way he envisioned. The current Mazda 2 gearbox is internally identical to our gearing and has the 3.85 so Mike and an R&D partner started playing with it.

2. Later in the year, after the R&D group was discussing the 3.85 as an option I realized the discussion had progressed to CSR level awareness. So I brought it up on a CSR call and CLEARLY stated that this was not going to be an Enterprises mandated item. It had to be obviously needed and overwhelmingly requested by the community; not even just the CSR’s.

Ok, this is going to take too long. I’m not going to go step by step…that was the origin anyway. No one wanted to decide before data, but instead we chose to NOT ADD SOMETHING…that is what we said. No one gets data like Mike Davies, so that will be great to see after some head to head testing. Also, alternatives exist that are not even known to all yet.

Many things have stayed the same in my almost 9 years at SCCA Enterprises; many things have changed. One constant is that even today, with a much more active Board than I had the first 7 years, the great majority of decisions are made by me day in and day out. The biggest decisions (those that set company direction or philosophy) are made by a team of extremely intelligent men who pay their own expenses to serve as your leadership. Before you insinuate that we could ever put the future of this great product, class and community at risk I want you to think about one thing. If every decision you made, for your employment (I’m just an employee, many of you own your own companies) was subject to public forum scrutiny how would you have done; compared to my / our track record. If you think it is better, I am truly a believer in lifelong learning, show me the public forum where I can observe your incredible successes. Until that day I would suggest you stay active, continue to speak your mind but maybe you can refrain from the behind the scenes mob mentality and ominous comments on forums. If you are going to explode without voicing your opinion, call me...248 761-3704.

Maybe an automatic would be a nice option I miss so many second - third- second shifts it would add to the engine reliability

So what I'm hearing is that it's over.

http://youtu.be/q7vtWB4owdE

Thanks, Eric, for the response. Glad to see I wasn't the only one concerned with where this discussion was going.
Bob

Ok, last post for now. I probably shouldn't refer to data...without saying where / when. Daytona next month is a huge target weekend. If stars align we are looking at 5 or more GEN3's! Does the 3.85 R&P car run out of revs long before turn 1 is the first question. Then what do two same ratio cars run like nose to tail, how fast do they go? What are the acceleration rates with the two R&P's at various places on course? How much time in each gear do we see with the different ratios?

Obviously I wish the genie was back in the bottle until we had a neatly tied ribbon around the facts.

Erik: good luck on the data collection and thank you for the responses as well as everyone else's. I know you know many of us are not at the level where we will leave for indianapolis anytime soon (as drivers that is) and really enjoy weekend after weekend of racing wherever and whatever we are up against. The camaraderie in SRF speaks for itself. This class is the best and this forum allows us to know more than most of knew of anything going on 20 or more years ago in our class and club. I will wait and watch with growing excitement over this year. Thanks again!

See Mike D'd last post in here:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1307&start=10

2 different Gen 3's on same track, 2 different gear sets and better/worse performance out of each depending on the corner. The gearing is what it is for any given track.

Not to sidetrack the actual gearing discussion, but was not some of the initial gear breakage issues related to the quick take up of the first clutches tried? Now that Gen 3 has settled on a milder clutch closer to what we have now there is less shock on the gear set.

FWIW, I was in the "go for 385 crowd" partly because of R&P availability, partly because it might have been slightly better gearing on some tracks vs the engine revs, but if Enterprises is confident that we have an adequate supply of 362 gears for the next several years, I can live with that decision being closed for now.

Wow Erik, Thanks for taking me from Mark to Mr. Vultaggio. I agree with the approach Enterprises is taking regarding testing and then deciding. In my case, I misinterpreted Enterprises position to mean that it was a dead issue through 2015. At this time, I believe I drew the wrong conclusion after reading your post and not properly understanding the "not added" statement. I hope what permeates through my comments is that I think the new package is going to be nice and I can not wait to get my hands on one.