Speaking from personal experience, I don't think it was the novice years or even the amateur years where I became part of that turnover. It was actually the 2nd or 3rd expert year. There is a clear delineation between the new experts and the seasoned experts simply due to the tightened gaps between lap times.

Example, finding a full second as a novice is easy. Can be done through becoming a better racer and is worth at least 4-5 spots at the finish. You can make these gains for quite awhile.

You jump up to amateur/expert stuff and it gets a little tougher. Finding a full second gets tougher and passing more people gets harder as well. You start to look for other ways to gain time. Most folks resolve this issue by throwing money at it. This is a one-way street and why I think the turnover is so high, especially among the experts. This was my situation to a T. I got stuck in the expert class running around in 6th or 7th place and it got old. I threw money at it and actually went backwards from being so frustrated and not having any fun. Luckily, I saw the writing on the wall before I went broke.

I don't think you will ever be able to control the turnover at any level in racing. Many people have always wanted to "try it out" and become novices. It either is or isn't what you expected and you stay or move on. Simple as that. If you come back to be an expert, you are obviously hooked and are choosing to stick around......until you either run out of money or stop having fun (which usually go hand in hand).

I am against changing the novice championship. There needs to be a logical progression to allow people to have fun and move up, which I think there is. If someone is clearly staying novice and smoking everyone's shit year after year, then that is sandbagging. I don't think making someone move up after a few podiums is the answer though.

Don't get me wrong Dave, I fully agree with you on the primadonna aspect of racing. Slow racers with the fastest, coolest equipment are still slow racers. Rules should be written to prevent this kind of crap, ie spec 600 class maybe.