Chris,
I agree to a certain extent with what you say regarding the new barrels being 'more alike' shall we say? However, no matter what technique is now being used to produce the 'new and equal' barrels, there will still be, as alaways, a set of manufacturing tolerances.
I'm not trying to teach my granny to suck eggs here, but for the benefit of those who have not come accross the terminology before, it basically means that Rotax will have a design drawing that says the bore will be 50mm (for ease of this posting). They will however allow barrels to be used even if they turn out to be say 49.8mm or evn 50.2mm, and this will be the same for every other critical dimension on the barrel i.e port size and height, head volume blah, blah, blah.
As soon as there is a tolerance allowed on something that is performance related, there will therefore be a performance difference, and so we will be in exactly the same situation with 'good and bad barrels' availability. The only difference will be that the 'bad' 09 barrels will be faster than the 'good' 04 barrels BUT there is always going to be someone with the peach of all barrels, and that is the lucky person who gets one of the 'really good' 09 barrels. See my point? No change, but a $hit load more money spent with JAG, engine suppliers/builders/tuners etc etc etc.
Net result will be that that the lucky ones with money will have the barrels, the ones who go to race with the lucky ones will just have there @rces kicked even harder.
There really is only one winner here, the importer, it's just like the new cadet carb that was introduced to level the playing field, cobblers! These changes have been introduced to increase turnover and nothing else.
The losers are the less wealthy, and the sport of Karting.
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