Originally Posted by Peter Zimmermann
Well, I'm new to the Pelican forums, but certainly not to P-cars or PCA (I'm a 35+ year member). The remarks that I've read in this thread (about PCA/Pano) don't surprise me, it's been a few years since I've actually read an entire article in Pano. In the beginning, PCA wouldn't devote much ink to competition (we had to go to the renegade POC for that), but since the Club Race program started it's become a very different club.
Much like high school, where you had the; (1) scholars, (2) the jocks, (3) the non-conformists, (4) the nerds, and (5) that small clique of perfect people who got good grades, had the right haircuts, wore the right Levis, and hung out at "The Square," the area on campus reserved for perfectness. PCA seems to fit the last group, sometimes generating an article about race cars/drivers that we've all read before, and all to often telling us about a trip to a far off land, by the chosen few, to test this wonderful, or that wonderful, brand new xxx, all the while writing with an air of perfectness.
Quite a few years ago a tech article appeared in Pano, one that I took exception to. It involved an element of the CIS cars, those very cars that I worked on virtually daily from the beginning of their run in 1973. I wrote a counter-point to the article, supported with both experience and facts. That letter never made it to print. Months passed, a PCA concours was held in Santa Barbara, CA, and the author of the article was heard bad-mouthing me to the extreme, including using names for me that would have embarrassed any pre-Internet teen, about my counterpoint to what he had written. How do I know this? He was talking with one of my best friends. I had never felt comfortable at PCA meetings, always looking into "The Square" from a corner of the room, always feeling somehow...inferior. And it seems that PCA has done nothing to correct this image of perfection, when it would be so easy for them to reach out to the real PCAers, the folks that get dirty in their garage on the weekend working on their less than perfect, but damn good, 911s.
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