It's cool that were having this conversation, heres how I look at the numbers. I admit I didn't dig deep into your analysis, but my sense is that you are taking finishing average speeds of the top guys in the class etc, and I don't think that is the way to analyze start positions. Everyone knows trophy trucks are way faster than anything but look at how many tt's break/crash/go of cliffs(self deprecation) and if we applied the same logic 1 cars would start ahead of trophy trucks.(I am a little loose with the facts but most likely correct) Now I started 40th at Baja and when my steering broke I was 4th on the road. I passed lots and lots and lots of 1 cars and TT's. So lets say at Baja I was the fastest pro-truck and Chris Harrold was the fastest 10 car. Although Rick won, Chris was turning faster splits everywhere except the crossover road where Rick beat him by a minute. Now the 1st 2 checks we all are eating dust so no one is really racing(at least your not supposed to be pinning it yet) I was only a little faster anyway, like 2 minutes. Then it was 2-3-7 minutes faster than Chris and 3-3-8 minutes faster than Rick. So when I broke it was like 17 minutes faster. So heres my spin, on the averages your data may well support that case but on the road, while we are pinning it, it doesn't. I would suspect that most of the 10's get by the PT's while they are parked oops(no commentary on drivers only talking vehicles here) .
Someone said so what about primm... ok I remember last year and Shep won PT and beat all the 10 cars. But I think that is the race and the area that the PT's have the least advantage. I think half way Mark Hutchins may have had him by a minute or two. But Shep ended up beating him by like 10 or 11 min's.
In Summary, I think when the guys are pinned, the PT's have an advantage. But! since I haven't seen another PT guy in here maybe you 10 guys scare them all! Anyway I bought mine as a pre-runner, I put over 7000 miles on it running around with Lightning for 6 weeks at the Baja 2000 pre-run and it worked flawless. I only got to drive one day in the TT at Nevada 2000 so I drove that PT in TT on all the other days and we ended up 4th TT (with a spare trans, spare v-drive among other spares for the TT's)and I don't believe a 10 car beat us there either. After we all got fired.... uh hum, the VORTEC program got canceled... I figured what the heck lets try and race it for real. And the 500 was my first shot. I totally respect all you guys cause I know this racing is no easy deal. The hardest part of this whole thing is passing guys in the dust so it's understandable that everyone wants to do the least of it possible.