With the 2023 Runoffs Class Tracking page on the SCCA's web site now complete, I opted to do some additional computations beyond what's shown there and it's not pretty. Year over year, really only 4 club racing classes are "stable": GTL, SM, GT2, and FE2. The rest saw double digit percentages in decreased participation year over year with T1 seeing the largest percentage decrease.
The 2022 Majors events (not including Runoffs) saw an average of 194 participants compared with 216 in 2021. Total event participation decreased from 2021 to 2022 by 938 entries; that's a lot. Even the much-hyped B-Spec saw quite a decrease in both year over year total (-22%) and Runoffs participation (-51%).
The year over year participation change is normalized to account for 1 additional event in 2022. Thus, even though GT2 saw a total participation count increase in 2022, their participation actually decreased as a percentage of events. So, GT2 needed at least 239 in 2022 to account for the additional event to break even. This could be accounted for by having a certain number of GT2 cars that will go to a certain number of events. All other things being equal, if you then increase the number of events the average participation will decrease.
So, what are GTL, SM, GT2, and FE2 doing to help keep their numbers somewhat stable?