From Newsgroup: rec.autos.sport.cart

OT - but seriously informative about what drivers pay to race.
And yes, a fair number of my club's drivers have competed
at the Daytona 24. I remember at one of our winter banquets
one rued that he had spent $40,000 to be a partner on a team
for the Daytona 24, and the car had gotten destroyed before
he had a chance to drive in the race. !!! Bummer!

from https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a25857313/why-factory-built-gt-cars-are-replacing-homebrew-race-cars/

Why Factory-Built GT Cars Are Replacing Homebrew Race Cars
It all has to do with 'spanks.'

BY JACK BARUTH
JAN 14, 2019
imageKEVIN ADOLF

Ever noticed how long it takes you to realize that something is missing,
as opposed to how long it takes you to realize the presence of something
new? ThererCOs a real difference in the way our brains process those two different situations, mostly because our eyes arenrCOt nearly as good as
we think they are and the brain spends a lot of time filling in our
visual picture based on spotty information. For a good illustration of
this, think back to the last time you thought you saw a certain kind of
car in the distance, only to realize that it was a completely different
model a few moments later. In the instant of your realization, you might
have seen everything from the taillights to the roofline change right
before your eyes. ThatrCOs not an illusionrCothatrCOs your brain painting in what it expects to see from the newly identified vehicle.

I mention this so I donrCOt sound quite as stupid for walking up and down
the paddock at last weekendrCOs Roar Before the 24 a full ten times before
I realized what was missing: the ST-class touring-car racers. The moment
I realized they were gone, it felt like a physical punch in the gut. I
ran my first "pro" race a decade ago in the ST class of what was then
called the Grand-Am Koni Challenge, which later became Continental Tire Challenge and is now called IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge. Note that the
only word to stick it out through all three iterations is "Challenge." ThatrCOs because it can be a real challenge for the "spanks" to pay their bills.

I was a "spank" in Koni Challenge, you see. ItrCOs possible yourCOve never heard that phrase, because the oh-so-polished announcer crews for IMSA
and other forms of racing like to use the phrase "gentleman driver."
Within the paddock, however, the term is "spanks," in contrast with the
pros who are paid to race. Well, sometimes theyrCOre paid to race. More
often than yourCOd suspect, they are not paid anything beyond expenses, if anything at all.

Not all spanks are created equal. In my case, I had a credit balance
with the parent company of the race team, so I didnrCOt actually pay anythingrCoI just agreed to cancel the debt I was owed. Other spanks
simply pay a fee roughly equal to their percentage of the teamrCOs
operating costs. Then you have the "super-spanks" who pay their bill
plus all of the expenses of their teammate, plus a salary for that
teammate. The sports-car racing business absolutely, positively runs on spanks.

Spanks are everywhere in American "pro" racing. Some of the names that
you hear repeated over and over again as series champions, even in
prototypes? TheyrCOre spanks. The showoff in your PCA chapter with the
Rolex watch? Spank. The suspiciously omnipresent young "star racers" who appear on everybodyrCOs YouTube channel and straight-to-cancellation Top
Gear ripoffs? Total, complete, utter, check-writing, Paypal-sending
spanks. That's not to say being a spank makes you un-talented or
precludes your chance of success. Everybody knows that Lance Stroll, the Williams F1 driver, is a spankrCobut did you know that Eddie Jordan
brought Michael Schumacher on board early in his career because he came
with significant third-party funding?

ThererCOs no shame in the spank game. We are everywhere. We win races, we
set lap records, we take home championships. Sometimes we beat the data
of our "pro" teammates. Or we get in a first-place GS-class Continental
Tire Challenge car halfway through a race, bring it home in 13th place
at the end after thoroughly and completely embarrassing ourselves for 90 minutes, then accuse the pro of sabotaging the brakes during the
pitstop. True story.

The most important thing for you to understand about spanks is that we
are customers. Which means that we want to get the most for our money. Virtually nobody will pay to drive around in a last-place car. Virtually nobody will pay to drive a car that turns wicked lap times in the hands
of a pro with a thousand hours behind its wheel, but which humiliates
and embarrasses spanks who often get just a single 20-minute practice
session before each race.

Worse than all of that, howeverrCoworse than the slow cars, the dangerous cars, the scary cars, and the cars that give us a painful shock when we
plug our helmet cords into the ungrounded radiorCois the car that breaks. Being a spank can cost real moneyrCowe're talking between $35,000 and
$75,000 a weekend for driver fees in the GS class of the Michelin Pilot Challenge. Add in flights, hotels, meals, family travel, and motorcoach expensesrCoand, more often than not, a $4200 custom OMP suit with all the logos and a $2000 carbon-fiber helmet. Imagine spending all of that,
only to find out that the car suffered a major failure during Friday
practice, or burned up its wiring harness in qualifying. That spank will
be angry.

Teams that canrCOt field both of their cars all the way through every pro-racing weekend usually close up shop in a big hurry. This isnrCOt bargain-basement endurance racing, where fixing the thing is part of the
fun. This is a situation where an investment banker or surgeon shows up
with an entourage of ten people to watch him play Steve McQueen at
LeMans, at a total cost often exceeding $100,000. When everybody shows
up and there's nothing to watch? That's the fertile soil in which breach-of-control lawsuits grow and flourish.

image
COURTESY JACK BARUTH
The obvious solution to these problems? Build, and race, a reliable car.
Which was no trouble in 1995, but todayrCOs street cars are extremely difficult to successfully prep and run. Consider my 2013 Accord, which I
ran in World Challenge last year and might run in SRO TC America this
year. It was converted inside a Honda factory by Honda employees who had access to every single bit of information ever created during the carrCOs conception and designrCobut the dashboard still looks like a Christmas
tree and it will occasionally just turn off and require a full reboot,
like a Windows 95 computer. And thatrCOs a $31,000 family car. How much tougher is it to build a racer out of a $250,000 exotic?

While the spanks and their teams have been wrestling with cars that turn
off for no reason and lose their ABS in the middle of wet races, the sanctioning bodies have been contemplating a different issue: how to
equalize, regulate, and penalize cars that are built one at a time in
small shops across the country. As counterintuitive as this sounds, the various pro series donrCOt really have a lot of time to scrutinize each competitor every single weekend. ItrCOs not like they use a NASCAR
template on my Honda. I could have built the whole thing in 13/14ths
scale and theyrCOd probably never catch me. Something needed to change.

Which is how I found myself standing in the paddock at the Roar,
mourning the recently-deceased ST class of converted street cars. ItrCOs
been replaced by TCR, which is a fully-homologated class of
factory-built race cars designed to resemble each other more than they resemble the street cars on which they're nominally based. At the same
time, the cars in the GS class, which used to a be a strange brew of
factory racers like the Ford FR500 and home-builds from established race shops, now draws exclusively from factory-built FIA GT4-class racers
assembled by McLaren, Audi, Ford and other major players.

image
LISA LINKE/PORSCHE
If you go to an IMSA race this year, you wonrCOt find any converted street cars. If you attend one of the SRO races, like the Blancpain GT series, yourCOll note that pretty much every racer in the paddock is campaigning a factory-built car. ThererCOs a reason for this: nearly everybody loves
this new system. The factories like selling the cars, the teams love the reduced maintenance, and the pros like the relatively benign nature of customer-focused equipment like the Mustang GT4 and McLaren 570GT4.

Most importantly, the spanks love it. They love knowing that they are
going to get solid value for their money. They love knowing that they
have a fighting chance against the rest of the field, since the cars in
each class are equalized at the factory. And they love the fact that
they will probably never spend a weekend staring at the backs of their
hands because some hand-fabricated motor mount exploded and the tech who
built it quit the team six months ago.

I canrCOt argue with any of the above. And I can attest that itrCOs
virtually impossible for a one-off converted street car like my Honda to compete on equal terms with factory-built racers like the ones made by
BMW or Porsche. But I think we will all be worse off when the last
home-brew racer disappears from professional competition. It will mark
yet another progression in our despicable cultural slouch from "do-it-yourself" to "one-click shopping." TomorrowrCOs race mechanics,
like todayrCOs dealership mechanics, will largely focus on reading a diagnostic screen and swapping some parts. When the TC America class
closes up shop in 2021, it will mark the end of shop-built or home-built
pro racing in the United States. Trust me, and your brain, on this one:
you might not notice right away, but yourCOll eventually miss it when itrCOs gone.
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