rant2d

About Winning & The Inverted Pyramid Theory

(or: About, At The Very Least, Making Sure Everyone Else Feels Inferior)

Normal Unc Rant Warning: while the premise of this stuff is slot car drag racing, it occasionally travels rather far afield in pursuit of some points I think are worth considering. You may not. Which is why the Section is labeled "Opinions & Editorial Comments." But you already knew that, right? It also contains some not-so-oblique references to one of my sponsors products. But you knew that too, or at least suspected it. Either it withstands logical examination or it doesn't. So have at it and draw your own conclusions.

There's a scene in a baseball movie, Bull Durham, I believe, where the coach, in an effort to motivate his team, explains baseball in its most basic terms: "This is a simple game. You throw the ball. You catch the ball. You hit the ball." Let me try to put that in a context that applies here: "This is a simple hobby. You drag race slot cars. Some times you win. Some times you lose." In that light, I wonder why some people in this hobby attach more to winning than reality would suggest.

I can't speak for anyone else, but in my "real car" racing, I discovered there are as many (or more) ways to win a race as there are to lose one. Yes, you have to be prepared and, usually, not downright awful to win. But I have witnessed and participated in some really bizarre wins. Doesn't take many of those to give you a good dose of the humbles on the victory podium. As the racing gets more intense and/or professional, the "humble factor" actually goes up, not down, forced or otherwise. After a win, ever seen Warren Johnson say "Well, those guys really ****** today, didn't they? Lamest bunch of losers it's ever been my pleasure to humiliate!" And why not?

Because no matter how they feel, that isn't how the big boys play the game. Or even most of the not-so-big boys. Racing for them is a business and a profession, as well as (hopefully) a passion. It's the same reason professional football coaches try to avoid running up the score - it's in poor taste, it might motivate the opposing team to rise to the occasion, and for all they know, they could be coaching the other team in a year or two. All things being equal, not even diamonds are forever.

So, you're wondering, is this some sort of cyberbabble fog about why Unc doesn't have wins and records in large flashing red letters all over his site? No, it's about how the hobby seems to be occasionally populated by people who want to convince you that if we're not using the stuff they use, we're racing junk produced by idiots. You don't have to appreciate technical and competitive subtleties to see the difference between "I just won this race (with a Chevy, as you'll note by the logos plastered all over everything), but those other guys put up a heck of a fight." and "My Chevy really put it to those ****** Fords today, huh?" Let me put it another way. Save for political contests, an "alternate universe" where it seems everything is fair game, if put-downs and derisive comments are effective, why don't major advertisers use them?

Out there in the "real world," advertising (about which I know a teensie bit) is originated and driven by a classical "features/benefits" proposition, tailored by market research and consumer review and testing, and guided by resources and production capability. Or: companies advertise stuff they think you want to buy based on whether or not they can make it inexpensively enough and sell enough to make a buck (or a gazillion, depending). No matter what you're being bombarded with on TV, radio, newspapers, billboards, or point-of-sale material, it all has its genesis in the "features/benefits" equation. The problem of "product differentiation" occurs when your features/benefits package closely parallels your competitor's ("Sure, they look the same, but ours is blue.") Think laundry detergents; they all wash clothes fairly well, are all formulated to foam more than necessary ('cause we, it turns out, don't think they're working unless they foam a lot), and all come in various liquid and solid forms. How do you get people to buy yours instead of theirs?

By examining the features of your product until you find one where market research tells you that one or more of your benefits is advantageous compared to those of the "leading brand" (or "trailing brand", as the case may be). Better value (do more with less = save money), convenience (no-drip pour spout = more accurate measuring = save money) and ease of use (premeasured packet = simplicity/save time) are common differentiators. Foods use value, packaging, and taste, the latter being somewhat iffy; like "blue," if you prefer the taste of a Whopper to a Big Mac, advertising can't convince you to pull under the Golden Arches instead of going to Burger King. That's where "value" comes in. A 99 cent Whopper promo may "economically" outweigh a $2.29 burger and temporarily alter your buying habits (which is why they do it; a certain percentage of temporary customers predictably become permanent customers. It also now and then tells you how much it really costs to make a burger). "Quality" gets a little fuzzier; while it's relatively easy to differentiate high quality from low quality in the context of a product's "whatness" ("Our widgets are made from good, sturdy stuff, while theirs are made from home-made dog doodoo."), it gets a little harder in the context of "howness." All laundry detergents clean; how well they clean depends on judgements made from preconceived criteria essentially drawn from other differentiating criteria, e.g., value/convenience/ease of use.

Other major differentiators. are style and "perceived status"; unlike substantial claims, these are a market research crapshoot. We're back to "blue" again. Style involves your taste vs. my taste vs. their taste; sometimes you pick what looks good to you, and other criteria be damned. As basic transportation and utility modules, there is no substantive functional difference between a Ford pickup and a Chevy pickup, but don't tell that to most of the people who buy them. "Perceived status" is generally economically based (sometimes "socioeconomic" - don't ask), and is one of the (many) reasons why Timex watches and Rolex watches both end in an "x", keep reasonably accurate time, but don't cost the same. Status only applies when a) people are aware of it and, more importantly, b) acknowledge it. Which is to say that the "right" Rolex may have caché with the Rodeo Drive crowd, but isn't enough of a shiny bauble to be worth 400 cows to the leader of a rural African village. All status (like almost all style) is relative.

So, wandering back to slot car drag racing from African villages (and on what other slotcar Web Site can you make that trip, huh?), let's examine "winning" again from the perspective of marketing a slot car drag racing chassis.

Admit it: you knew it was coming, you just didn't know how or when. Now you do.

Start with the "winning" part: as a claim, it must be a benefit, 'cause it ain't a feature of the product. If it was, every unit would have to win every time, or at least a large, predictable percentage of the time. I don't know about you, but other than some major races, I don't have a clue as to who wins what at the raceway in East Gerbil, Montana, or similar environs. So, accurately expressed, the benefit must be something more like "Wins some races." Great. Which means an equally accurate claim would be "Loses some races." Reality-based, but not a headline likely to move stuff out the door. Either claim also ignores context, the who, what else, and how of the package necessary to get to the "winning" part. And we already know (or at least we should) that sometimes winning has nothing to do with how good we or our stuff is, but rather, occasionally, with how lucky we are or unlucky someone else is.

Working backwards then, what can a chassis manufacturer offer you as a consistent package of features and benefits that is independent of ability and conditions? How would the classical benchmarks of better value, convenience, and ease of use apply to something like a chassis (style doesn't apply much where functionality is far more important, unless you happen to pick chassis by how they look rather than how they work, and status isn't meaningful in this context unless you like impressing people by outspending them)?

Most people apply, consciously or otherwise, the concept of "cost-effectiveness," or what the Brits commonly refer to as "value-for-money," to a majority of their purchases, and there's no reason to ignore that idea now. We're not talking engagement rings, after all. Let's say you and your level of disposable income and slot car drag racing budget encounter two chassis, one priced at $20 and one at $80. You can afford both of them. So how you view them depends on what it is you want them to do. Yea, I know - "win." Great. Remember the "how" part? If you're like most people, you construct a list of what you value, then attach a monetary value to those things as represented by your two choices. Your equation: cost divided by (what you see and/or value as) ease of assembly, utility, suitability, longevity, perceived/reported/witnessed performance, doo dah, doo dah. If none of it computes and you have or can learn the requisite skills, maybe you end up making your own chassis; your solution, perhaps, is time-neutral and cost/performance weighted. Most of us, even the ones who can make our own, usually end up buying someone else's; our solutions are time-dependant as well as cost/performance weighted. One way or another, everyone ends up somewhere along that sliding scale.

Not that the scale is all that huge, mind you. Ours is not, to put it gently, the largest of all possible hobby "universes." Actually, it's rather small. Real small. From the perspective of a, you should excuse the expression, "real" universe, invisible-to-the-naked-eye small. Certainly, it's important to us, but there are actually so few of us that our assembled masses fall below the radar of mass-marketers, and even niche marketers for that matter. Our current universe of competition is heavily weighted towards the performance-independent end; imagine it as the base of a pyramid (and at least 7/8ths of its bulk, I'd wager), made up of bracket racers and a smattering of Index racers. Surprise: just like real life. The top 1/8th or less is heads-up Class racing, the participation numbers rapidly diminishing as the Class cost goes up (accompanied by a wider variance in successful performance within any given Class between the competitors). A reasonably accurate, if not a little conservative, assessment, right?

Fine. Now turn that pyramid upside down until it's balancing on its point.

This is the slot car drag racing universe as some would have you see it, founded on, dependent on, driven by, and rotating around that infinitely small point.

********, pure and utter ********.

Hey, we in slot car drag racing didn't invent this state of affairs. That honor goes to our distant cousins, the "wing" car racers. 99.9% of the slot car road racing world is running inexpensive stamped steel stuff with NASCAR bodies, and the slot car mags still devote six pages to trimming a wing car body. Go figure. But that's, as well as I can figure it, where the "Our expensive stuff that you don't have is great, so the rest of our **** must be equally outstanding, huh?" theory of slot car racing advertising came from. Its corollary, "If you're not racing our stuff you must be a loser, literally and figuratively" followed soon thereafter. And since we all know that wing car racing is absolutely, positively, unquestionably the most important part of slot car road racing, is it any wonder why people transferred the theory to slot car drag racing?

How that universe works: Joe Guy runs three or four bracket cars and an index race or two, but when he hears about how well that new Snarling Wombat car did at the East Gerbil Shootout, he throws them all away and orders four Jr. Wombats from his local track, because, even though he can't afford one of those spiffy Snarling numbers, they should be just as good, right?

********, pure and utter ********.

How this universe works: Joe Guy runs three or four bracket cars and an index race or two, but when he hears about how well that new Snarling Wombat car did at the East Gerbil Shootout, he says "Oh?" and goes back to wondering why slot car drag tires cost so much, whether he should replace them on the bracket car that also runs a 1.090 Index, and what's on TV tonight.

Sudden thought: if you ever bought an automobile solely because its name was on the valve cover of an engine that won the Indy 500, I've probably insulted you, right? Gosh, uh, I'm really, really, really sorry.

(to continue) I foolishly assume people approach this decision-making process the same way they approach other similar processes, with a combination of common sense and cost analysis.While more expensive than the decision process involving a small versus a medium coffee at the 7-11, we ain't talking buying a house here either. But all decisions involving more than pocket change (for most of us, anyhow) involve weighing variables, and I simply don't think some people have a death grip of what they really are for a vast majority of us.

Look, when you come down to it, there are very few manufacturers who have ever made truly hideous chassis, widely acknowledged to be unmitigated crap, and of those few who did, all of them, I believe, are now out of business (Market forces? What market forces?). All of what remains varies between sort of ok and outstanding - depending on the application. There are a few one-off chassis manufacturers out there who made (and may still be making) some pretty iffy stuff. I bought, examined, and sold them because I couldn't envision making them work for the purposes I intended, but the people I sold them to run them as bracket and index cars and love them. Different needs, different equations, different applications equal different results.

Again, just like real life, huh?

Speaking of which, about this point you might be wondering whether this is all just shilling for my sponsor, good old Drag Racing Specialties and that Spawn of Satan Himself (Plano, TX Division), Bob Herrick.

Sure. Reads just like a DRS ad, doesn't it?

Actually, when I stumbled into this hobby some years ago, and started paying attention to who was making what, I figured that any guy who made that many different types of chassis either had a fetish for the feel of .050 spring steel or was open to experimentation and options for different applications (there are those words again). This, it appeared, was a decent guy with whom to have a working relationship. Over the years, I've benefited greatly from it, and perhaps, I hope, he has as well.

Not counting advice, discussions, recommendations, diatribes, encouragement, and other "intellectual property" (pretty heady term to toss around when discussing the interchanges between Unc and The Prince of Darkness, right?), I can balance all the "secret mission" stuff I've ever gotten from Bob on the tip of one finger. None of which, contrary to what you might expect, ever happened to be motor bits, and none of which ever saw the light of day outside the confines of my shop. Never saw the need, honestly. Why? Because, among other things, of a conversation I had a fair number of years ago with Joe Cheichi. In the course of our conversation, Joe, who's been a major-league player in this hobby for what seems like forever, made a statement that struck me as so absolutely clear and insightful that it's stayed with me for these ensuing years. Basically, he observed that most everybody could make about the same power out of a slot car motor, given the right tools and approach, but that the largest gains in reduced elapsed times could be achieved by understanding how and why the chassis worked, and getting it to work better.

That concept coincided with my experience in real cars over the years. To a large degree in drag cars, and to an almost overwhelming degree in road racing cars, chassis and suspension work (in which I include tires) offer a far easier and less expensive means of lowering elapsed times/lap times than pursuing that last tenth of a horsepower by examining the bits of your motor embedded in the dyno room wall. I may be lucky, but I've never had the correct spring/sway bar combo explode in a real race car yet. So who better to pursue the Holy Grail of the right chassis for the right Class with than a guy who spends a majority of his working day thinking about slot car drag racing, and chassis in particular? Seems like a no-brainer to me, but what do I know?

Just in case you you think that I always end these things with a whimper, rather than a bang (usually the result of writing them in segments and never editing them), let me throw you a bonus for trudging this far if you're still actually reading. The unequivocal key to making a slot car drag racing chassis work is understanding what "polar moment of inertia" means in our circumstances, and redimensionalizing it into the appropriate plane. Remember that mass and weight are not the same thing, then review Newton's First Law of Motion with an eye on what we really do with this stuff. Worth about .025-.030 of a second on most, but not all cars under most circumstances. So now you know. Don't say I never told you anything valuable, ok?

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