Interesting reading as I have two perspectives on this, as I’ve seen it from both sides of the fence. I apologise in advance for being long winded but you'll see the point at the end. Firstly, two years ago when we started racing Hondas in France. The local myth was that all the Honda were equal out the box, which is patently not so, not until they are race prepared are they close. The racing when I started in France was c**p with up to 4 seconds between lap times and everyone scrabbling for better engines.
So I worked out what was needed to optimise the engine within the rules and shared it with all those racing in our region, this made the racing much closer and everyone benefited, especially the drivers, as once the finger pointing concerning engines stopped, driver tuition became more important and standards improved, closing the gap to under a second. Not perfect, but with incorrect fixed gearing (another story), the best possible.
Shortly afterwards, 3 of us from the club, travelled to another region of France to take on the new French champion at his local track. We creamed him into 4th place, 2 of us taking 24 seconds out of him in a 10 lap race. You can imagine the s**t hit the fan, in fact even after completely dismantling engines, the local officials wanted to DQ us on a suspicion of cheating and it took some high level intervention from the Federation to sort it out. So after this I published all the information I could on the Internet about how to optimise engines and last year the racing in many regions consequently improved. However as a result of this two other things happened, firstly I hear that professional engine builders here have used some of this information to build illegal engines and secondly the Karting business has seen the number of engines sales drastically fall off (previously people just kept buying engines until by chance they got a good one). As a result of this the engines are being sealed next year, which will of course bring the problem full circle.
Fast forward a year and after getting fed up with all the BS in France we are now racing S1 in the UK. After racing at what passes for the top level in France, we thought we were quite good. So it was quite a shock to find ourselves nearly a second off the pace at the first two rounds. Even with what I know, for a while I admit to thinking along the same lines as others, concerning what the opposition might be spending on engines. But some perseverance saw us nearly on the pace at the last round and we now know that the time is in the set up and driver, so many small things add up, things you might not even think of at club level, simply because you don't need too. I don't know about Comers, but for sure with the Honda the difference in engines is small enough for a good driver to still surface.
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