A new category within each class would have to be created to accommodate alternative fuels and put them on an equal footing. I've only just started getting interested in LSR so I don't know how proactive the sanctioning bodies are in moving toward new technologies. I imagine someday it will happen. If it happens in my lifetime that's okay. If it doesn't that's okay too. I'm into things that go fast on the ground, without propellers.
The first thing you need to learn is land speed racing isn't that pasteurized homogenized cookie cutter clone "level the playing field" crap spec racing you see in NASCAR, NHRA, or Formula One. The performance of alternative fuels cars will have to depend on the skill and ingenuity of the racers designing and building the cars, not some bogus handicapping by the rulebook.
There are several things I am going to have to learn about land speed racing but based on your post I won't be learning any of it from you. Putting Formula 1 into the category of cookie cutter clones shows your ignorance. I lived in Europe through the late 70s and most of the 80s. I attended F1 and Group C/C2 races at every opportunity. The fuels in these cars had a smell that would scorch your lungs. The engineers pushed the technological envelope. Costs prompted change but those changes didn't hamper the quest for the best and the fastest. Today's normally aspirated F1 cars with the grooved tires are faster and better than their turbocharged predecessors. The LMS/ALMS cars that replaced the old Group C sports Prototypes of the 80s are also superior to their predecessors. There are very few series that have continued unbridled but F1, sportscars and land speed racers are three that have and that's what's so enticing about the sport.
If you were interpreting my comment that creating a new category within a class was an attempt to 'dumb' down the class then you have again proved that you have difficulty understanding normal thinking. Alternative fuel/hybrid vehicles should compete for records against like vehicles and new records established for that category of vehicle within the class.
I'm exiting this thread now. I'm finding you boring. Keep tilting at windmills.
Why is it that without a paint job no one can tell F1 cars apart? Design studies in the late eighties indicated the optimum F1 car would be one using a combination of fan suction and ground effects tunnels where the car depended on the tunnels at the end of straights entering into fast corners then transitioning into fan suction for the slower corners.
The rulesmakers have already dumbed down land speed racing.
At Speedweek 2008 there were 61 car records of over 175 mph set, or 56%, for an average record speed of 191.8 mph.
By coincidence, the average speed of the 107 car records listed in the 1974 SCTA rulebook is also 191.8 mph.
So how has it happened that 35 years of technical progress has had no influence whatsoever on the average speed of SCTA car records?
Out of the 107 Bonneville SCTA car records listed in the 1974 rulebook (i.e., all those records set by the end of 1973), 44 were 200 mph or faster. The slowest record listed, set in 1967 in H/Grand Touring, was 109.527 mph. There were no records below 100 mph. Every single record was triple digits.
Out of the 108 car records set at the 2008 Speedweek, 51 were 200 mph or faster. However, there were also records set of 106.531 mph, 103.978 mph, 93.994 mph, and 82.803 mph.
"I'm exiting this thread now" is the common refrain of smug elitists getting their asses kicked.
