Actually I have a tale to tell. The first year of buy-back we had an SP engine, not a very good one it turned out but supposedly SP. My son qualified faster than one competitor who knew immediately accused us of "cheating" since we had an SP engine and went off to claim it. Fortunately Bayford let us change to Honda Cadet for the meeting so he was frustrated. The irony is that previously this competitor had bragged about how he had previously run a race team and had one of his race engineers working on his engine.
We never raced Clubman again. We don't do Bayford for this reason. I'm not sure how many people feel the same. There were big clubman grid before the rule came in, and I thought the grid numbers dropped afterwards, but that was just my observation.
The system can be gamed if you have enough money so it is rather pointless. The cost of engines is related to supply and demand. There are now enough Honda engines around that prices have some down anyway. And there will always be those who pay thousands, or run trick engines and have the resources to live with the engine being bought every so often.
|
|
