Rally America Rules and Diesels
[ October 28th, 2008 ] By: Charles Smith Posted in » Ramblings
Rally America gives you a slight advantage if you chose to run a diesel in their Production classes. In order to equalize different cars in a class displacement limits are given, but it is not always the engine’s actual displacement (unless you’re running a 2WD NA car). They calculate it by providing multipliers for certain aspects of a car. A car with AWD is given a 1.3 multiplier, so if you were running a 1999cc NA AWD car your recalulated displacement would be ~2599cc.
So the multipliers (as of 10/25/08) are:
- Rotary - 1.8
- Forced Induction - 1.7
- AWD - 1.3
- Single Cam / Pushrod - 0.8
- Diesel - 0.8
So Diesel’s get a displacement advantage. So a 2000cc AWD NA diesel car would have about the same adjusted displacement as a 2000cc FWD NA gasoline car (80cc adjusted difference). You may or may not know that diesels tend to make more torque and consume less than their gasoline counterparts. So I wonder why they get the advantage in the rules.
This makes me wonder how a TDI would do in the rally world, especially in the open class (no displacement advantage given). Although I wonder how and if you could do an Anti-Lag system…hrmmm. While I’m thinking take a listen to the most famous diesel race car: Link for you RSS peeps.
