Gordon: That is exactly the problem; if you drive 45 minutes and no one shows up for your class, why should you be entitled to mix it up in a different class just because you want to be different? I'm not saying anything bad about brushless or anything else, these are just the facts of life.
If I show up at SoCal and say I want to race stock, but with a brushless, they will laugh in my face. Same for Trackside, RSJ, and on and on.
And they have a very good reason to.
If I show up at Joe's next LAN party with a hacked up copy of Quake 3 and I say, well no one else has this copy, but I still want to play, so let me in and we'll just not count my kills, he is going to laugh in my face too. Even though my copy may be technically superior, and even though I may not be eligible for the grand prize, it still takes away from the competition.
What entitles me to show up and say that I want to run illegal equipment for ANY reason? I could make a strong argument that lithium polymer cells are superior to NiMH cells, so does that mean they should let me run my LiPoly-powered car against others? It just doesn't make any sense.
If somebody wants to get into racing, they are making a committment to race in the established classes that everybody else is running. It is their choice. You don't like truing motors, and I don't like building shocks, so does that mean I should create a class for cars with no shocks? It just doesn't make any sense.
If MARCCA sticks to its rules and lets any 3 people who show up run a class, then that is 100% absolutely fine. But if only 2 people show up, there is no reason they should be allowed to run with another class. For starters, even if they aren't racing for points, it cheapens the racing for everybody else.
Down the road, I see brushless becoming a viable class, and you won't have the problem of only having one or two people there. But right now, that's not how it is. Dividing an already divided program is not going to help anybody.
As for drifting and such... that's not even racing. MARCCA shouldn't allow it. It just wastes everybody's time... real drifting competitions are judged, not timed. Trying to time a drifting "race" is absolutely ludicrous. If they were trying to do that while I was there, I'd be racing over to Trackside!