Grintch:
Are you talking about the national Street Touring classes or a local "Tire Class"? If it a local class, you need to ask this on your home regions forum. If it's Street Touring, the rules are pretty clear to me what cars are legal in the varius sub classes. Can you be more specific?
Top reasons to compete in Street Touring or a local tire class
1 - you don't have R compounds tires
2 - your car is better classed in ST than in Stock or Street Prepared
3 - the allowed mods better fit your car
Smaller regions that have the capacity for 8 runs as opposed to 4 do run street tire classes.
Here in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, we run car class first, i.e STS, HS, DSP, SM, FM and etc.
Then we have what we call pax classes, where there are three options of Sportsman, denoted by X, Street Tire, denoted by T and Novice, denoted by N.
Typically, newbies run in the Novice class until they win it where they have to graduate. One of the region has an added rule where it either until you win or 1 year from the first time you run in the N class.
Once, you graduate from the Novice class, then you have the choice of going to the Sportsman or Street Tire class.
The street tire class requires:
- Tires with treadwear of 140 or higher.
- Car class in any class except Street Touring, i.e STS, STS2, STU & STX. This is to eliminate double paxing as the index for those classes already account for street tires.
I usually run in the street tire class as I'm too cheap to buy r-comps all the time except for the divisionals and national tours.
Sportsman is where the cars equipped with r-comps and Street Touring classed cars run.