Vintage Road Racing Association

My goal here is to have tighter racing throughout the season creating less runaway situation. All while the fast stay fast whether because they are utilising the handicap or just plain fast they will stretch it out. if your having an exceptional race it will show. This encouragement should intice teams to race more events because they would technically be in a battle somewhere instead of impossibly spread out. Reverting back to previous handicaps for machines listed below should encourage even older machinery to run as they should, lets see more of them out there running hard!

Let's remember handicaps are to level machinery allowing older machinery to be competitive, not rider level or compensate for strategies!

Handicap Revision proposal as follows

Mix of 2023 and 2024 with slight revision
Vintage Lightweight P3L
SMP PRO 1.04, Calabogie 1.03, CTMP 1.01, SMP Long 1.03
Vintage Middleweight P4F2
SMP PRO 1.02, Calabogie 1.03, CTMP 1.02, SMP Long 1.02
Vintage Heavyweight P4F1
SMP PRO 1.02, Calabogie 1.03, CTMP 1.02, SMP Long 1.02
All other periods will revert back to 2023 handicaps as they are looser and should encourage older machinery to compete
No bonus point for finishing positions
Race tie breaks will be broken by on track finishing position
Season final tie breaks will be broken by highest total finishes (i.e. Team A 1win 1 top3 Team B 1win 1 top2, Team B scores above teamA)
Penalties will be given in km instead of laps to allow same penalty weight from round to round.

Goal: Produce tigher racing with less runaway between rounds disabling teams to catch even if they have an exceptional race.

I have reviewed handicaps back to 2021 season applying my proposal to all years including outcome of season totals. There was one major outlyer in the 2023 lightweight at rd1 that should be avoided.

Said team was a P4F3 84Laps 83Laps 82 Laps 80 Laps were all P3L bikes. 84 laps after handicap finished 4th.
A race for ease of calculations is 2 hrs = 7,200 sec pit stop at 2.5 minutes = 150 sec race start aprox 4 min = 180 sec
7,200 - 150 - 240 = 6810sec of race time
P4 finished after handicaps 4th place 20.316km behind the winner. How fast would P4 have to ride to win?
SMP Pro is 2.47km in lenth.

20.316 / 2.47 = 8.225 laps extra to win + 84 Laps completed = 92.225 laps so 92 Laps to be a virtual tie
6810 sec of racing time / 92 laps = 1,14,022 Lap time would have to be avg. In this instance a P4F3 bike would of have to run 1.322sec avg slower than the P4F3 record the entire race lenth which also would of have him lap vintage middle and vintage heavy once in this particular race. I would consider this an impossible feat! Also this is not including the extrapolation throught the next events to even make up that time milage. this is the runaway effect id like to avoid.

With my proposal overlayed i noticed the following through the 2023 season and was very similar throughout the previous seasons.

Spread is top competitive Teams.
RD1 SMP Pro
Lightweight 1 change 3rd and 4th, top 4 spread 20.316km reduced to 7.706km wow tight racing there!
Middleweight No change Spread of top 3 5km to virtual tie broken by finishing position. Wowww
Heavyweight no change Spread of top 3 21.401 to 11.905km thats a 8.66 km spread to 4.82km Still alot!

Rd2 Calabogie
Lightweight 1 change 2nd and 3rd, top3 spread 21.766km to 15.604km
Middleweight 1 change 2nd and 3rd, Whole field spread 24.887km to 14.443km
Heavyweight no change top 2 spread 18.968km to 15.604km

Rd3 CTMP
Lightweight no change top4 spread 11.029km to 3.997km wow.
Middleweight no change spread top2 18.828km to 11.871km
Heavyweight no change top 3 spread 36.692km to 27.62km

Rd 4 SMP Long
Lightweight No Change top 6 spread 55.277km to 26.8km the whole field!
Middleweight no change top 3 spread 24.747km to 12.735km who field again!
Heavyweight no change top2 Spread 20.41km to 12.735km

Season Totals

Lightweight 1 change bottom 2 top 3 Spread 66.779km to 65.868km
Middleweight no change spread top3 239.278km to 212.21km
Heavyweight 1 change 3rd and 4th hard to judge in 2023 as only 1st raced every round

Sinopsis:
round to round produced tighted spreads allowing possible changes if a team has a great race or a poor race instead of staying as is missing a large portion of a race. Encouraging the racers to keep their bikes running well. The front runners stayed out front.Surprisingly the teams who ran well still came out close up top at seasons end. change is negligible. spreads through the races and season final mostly were kept tighter by removing Bonus points.

I have all data in excell spreadsheet form and available to share if anyone would like to see.

Any and all feedback is welcome!

Matthew Winter
Endurance Coordinator

First day on the job and already you’ve made Endurance Racing better for it!
Thanks for the hard work Matthew.