Well guys, the Elise is giving us fits.
The problems are:
1) The car is physically small - smaller than most of the other cars currently in the class (although comparable to Miata)
2) The car starts off quite a bit lighter than most of the prepped cars already running in the class (although the two cars that we weighed at the Peru tour were somewhat heavier than expected)
3) The car has an MR drivetrain layout, which gives it a paper advantage over FR cars of similar weight, size, and power.
4) In Stock form, it's a little underpowered, but a power deficit is the easiest thing to overcome in a clas like SM/SM2
5) There's no goddamn place to put any significant amount of ballast. The trunk is nonstructural with a 50lb weight limit on it, and there's a 500lb load limit on the passenger compartment.
6) Although not as rare as (say) a Ferrari F40, it's still a rare and somewhat obscure car. It's harder to lay hands on an Elise than it is on a Miata, C5, or CRX.
One of the ideas that has been kicked around is to treat, for weight limit purposes, an MR car the same as an AWD car of the same displacement.
There's a certain amount of science behind that - an MR car should (all else being equal) put power down better than a FR car, but less well than an AWD car, and MR will typically be lighter than AWD (meaning more likely to be able to reach the weight limit at all) and should handle better than AWD due to a better polar moment of inertia (even over FR, typically) and the lack of handling problems induced by the driven front wheels on an AWD.
Stick your thumb in the air and squint at it, and MR and AWD have similar potential at the same weight/size/power. So at first blush, requiring an MR car and an AWD car to have the same weight limit looks reasonable.
Well, that makes the weight limit for an Elise (as a small-displacement, NA, MR car) something like 2200lbs. A stock Elise weighs in somewhere between 1850 and 1950, so we'd be asking an SM2 Elise to add 250-350 lbs of ballast and that's BEFORE the Elise engineer started making use of the SM allowances to add lightness. An Elise probably has less lightness availible to add compared to most cars, but we're still looking at (say) 400lbs of ballast, on average, for an Elise to be able to play.
Now putting aside, for a second, the attractiveness of requiring a car whose primary selling point is its low mass to add that much ballast, the packaging and mounting difficulties of adding 1.33 Scotty Whites worth of mass to a car with no place to put it cannot be handwaved away. If we figure 50lbs in that bloody nonstructural trunk, and a further 350 lbs bolted (somehow) to the passenger side floorpan (which in of itself requires a rule change, as prior to the Elise, we assumed that the trunk floor of any given car would be stressed to carry a significant load) that only leaves room for 150lbs of driver, according to the weight limit tag on the car.
Yurk!
So even though not a single person on the SMAC wants to outright BAN the Elise, we're finding it very difficult to find a practical way to slot it into the current class structure. I'm afraid that we're going to effectively ban the car, because the car won't be capable of jumping through the hoops we'll require of it.
I'm very much willing to hear ideas and proposals guys....
DG
