[SCG] [Corsabod] Factory Stock Corvair Entries and Stock Preservation Award history in CORSA Concours 1997-2009

[Kent Sullivan]

Hi,

Larry said:

> keep in mind we only look at cars that *might* be stock in classification;

> if a car comes in with obvious modifications, we send it to modified or 
> other class, and away it goes to operations check. that takes about 15 
> seconds to classify such a vehicle. if the car does look stock, and 
> that is where the owner wants to go, then i'll look it over much more 
> closely. could take 5-10 minutes. i'll then explain to the owner what
items 
> are not considered stock. keep in mind this is by necessity a limited 
> overview rather than a detailed and final list of non stock items.
> in the course of a typical concours classification, only about 20% of the 
> entries warrant the closer look the item that takes the longest, because
> every car regardless of class does it, it operations check. that will take
> about 10 minutes per car. so if there is a long line at 'classification'
> it's not the classification part that is taking all the time to do.

And this is what the SCG event has done and can do, more successfully at
some conventions and less at others. We need to raise awareness and get the
SCG event better synchronized with what is going on in concours
classification. But all of the pieces are there. We have some stock
"experts" (most of whom are students who know some things but who are always
learning) who are positioned usually just a few yards away from
classification who have workbooks ready for people who want to bring their
cars and learn what seems to be stock on their cars and what isn't. So the
opportunity for people to learn what is keeping them out of the Factory
Stock classes is there. Some years, quite a few people took advantage of
this service. This year, only one person did.

These are the very early days of the SCG, meaning we don't have official
books detailing everything we know about what and what isn't stock for each
year, but we try to have on hand people who have the knowledge in their
heads, and that does pretty well for now. We plan to get going on the
documentation effort soon--it's a massive, multi-year effort.

I should mention that the SCG event is not just about cars entered into
concours--we also very much want to see original cars that are not being
entered in concours, because they hold answers to some of the most difficult
questions. The "unmolested" cars, if you will--the time capsules that may
look like heck but have lots of good information. We have done a good job of
getting those sorts of cars to show up at some conventions, and not so good
at others.

What would be interesting to discuss is some way of helping people who want
to try for factory stock BEFORE classification occurs, or some way they
could go back through classification AFTER getting help from the SCG folks.
In both cases, doing this would make sense only if the things they need to
change could be changed while at the convention. Sometimes this is possible,
in the case of Bill Hubbell rounding up some correct bolts. Sometimes it's
not, because the part is very obscure and the reproduction doesn't look the
same.

Of the two choices, I would like to suggest the latter, since that means the
main SCG event could continue to be at the same time as classification,
which seems to work pretty well, and holding the SCG event before
classification poses scheduling problems since classification is pretty much
the first event of the convention. Since classification these days is really
about whether you get into Factory Stock or not, I would think we could
modify the concours rules to allow people to try twice at a given
convention--it should not be that much work given the low number of cars
trying.

I think small changes like this to the concours rules could really help
people who are interested in Factory Stock (Original or Restored) feel more
positive about their chances of getting in, and these changes reflect the
ideas behind the SCG, which are to learn from each other and encourage each
other as a community, rather than foster an exam-like situation that is
tense and stressful. There are too many cars that are very close to making
it into the Factory Stock classes but the owner has given up.

If we wanted to go slightly further, we could make official some sort of
policy where people who were very close to Factory Stock could get a limited
number of exceptions and those exceptions would be documented, with the idea
being that the next time the car was shown, those things had to be
corrected. Meaning, the exceptions would be for that concours only, not
future events.

--Kent
-----Original Message-----
From: scg-list-bounces at tiger.skiblack.com
[mailto:scg-list-bounces at tiger.skiblack.com] On Behalf Of The Vair Shop
Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2009 8:57 AM
To: airvair at earthlink.net; dal; flat6vair at comcast.net; whubbell at umich.edu;
corsabod at corvair.org; scg-list at tiger.skiblack.com
Subject: Re: [SCG] [Corsabod] Factory Stock Corvair Entries
andStockPreservation Awardhistory in CORSA Concours 1997-2009

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