To be honest David I haven't been in the sport long enough to remember when the first seat stays were introduced, I imagine they were initially introduced to give extra support to the top of the seat, but over time people have determined that they offer more than just seat support, I have a personal experience in which we stripped and totally rebuilt one of our karts, we decided during the rebuild that the rusty old seat stays looked better thrown in the bucket than going back on the kart, 3 laps around my local track and my kart buddy was making a 1 hr round trip to collect them as the kart felt all wrong and after checking everything else it was the only reasonable explanation as to the change, we refitted the stays and found the kart was back to as it was before, I agree if they were designed to be stiffeners then the seat mounting point would be a better place to mount them, we did investigate how and why they had such an impact and the only reasonable explanation was the extra rigidity they could offer, the chassis was an intrepid.
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