Welcome to the Show!

Welcome to the Optima Search For the Ultimate Street Car Series Podcast! This show is produced twice-per-month show and will be a great way to keep people informed on everything going on, from rules discussions, to event coverage, and to feature interviews with competitors and people of interest!

The show is hosted by myself (Rob Kibbe) and Race Director Jimi Day. Our goal is to bring you all of the latest and greatest information possible…plus have plenty of fun along with way. Feel free to e-mail us with feedback and questions, and we’ll work as many of them can into the show!

-Rob Kibbe (robert@fm3marketing.com) & Jimi Day (jimi@driveusca.com)

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Welcome Ron Sutton!

 

A HUGE THANKS to Ron Sutton Race Technology for coming on board as our very first sponsor! We’re proud to announce that Ron is back for 2016 with an entirely new workshop tour planned as well.

Stay tuned to future shows for details and Visit RonSuttonRaceTechnology.com to get more information on Ron’s incredible service lineup!

REMINDER: Ron’s NEXT 2016 Seminar will be held Thursday July 29 in Charlotte, NC!

www.ronsuttonracetechnology.com
Phone/Text: (916) 834-8051

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Welcome Forgeline!

We are incredibly proud to announce that Forgeline Motorsports has joined us on the OSUSC Podcast show for 2016! Forgeline has been a staple among OSUSC competitors, and their incredible wheels are as well engineered (and race tested) as they are beautiful.

Stay tuned to future shows to hear more from Forgline, and be sure to visit their website and give them a call for all of your competition wheel needs!

www.forgeline.com
Phone: (800) 886-0093

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 OPTIMA JIM:

Inside Scoop on How the Design and Engineering Segment Really Works

In this episode of the show we decided to bring on OPTIMA Jim to discuss the hard data that’s come out of the Design and Engineering segment of OSUSC events so far in 2016. For this season special consideration was made to ensure that the D&E portion of OSUSC events had equal weighting value to the driving segments, meaning this year D&E may have it’s potentially largest impact on results. That alone has caused more than a few people to take notice. Going further, since D&E includes both an objective (points based on car components either functioning or not) and subjective (a judge’s opinion) set of criteria it’s the one category where someone’s personal opinion has a literal impact on your overall event score – and that’s something that everyone has noticed.

With that said, the goal of the interview was to find out both how D&E affects one’s score (as well as how much) and also take a hard look at how it’s effected results thus far in 2016. In the end, while many speculated that the changes to D&E would be a big aid to the GTV class cars the data shows that it hasn’t quite worked out that way. A quote from Jim’s terrific Power Source blog is below that addresses this – and we hit it even harder in the interview:

“The impact of objective points has not been lost on competitors in this series and many have gotten up to speed quickly. In the first event at Thunderhill, more than 22% of the field lost objective points. By the fourth event at NCM Motorsports Park, just seven of 75 cars (9.3%) lost objective points and none were in the GTS or GTL classes.

While many speculated the changes in D&E scoring would heavily favor GTV competitors, the fact is 25 GTV cars have lost objective points at events this season, while only seven from GT and just three in both GTL and GTS. Apparently, it’s been tougher to keep everything working on the older cars.”

Thanks for listening!

-Rob & Jimi

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