"That statement would have been 100% true prior to the launch of the 09 Rotax barrel."
But that is only true while those who have worked out how to get an advantage from previous equipment catch up.
CNC'ed rather than manual production reduces the opportunity for tolerance matching, which is the only approved method of tuning a Rotax, but all it does is shift the emphasis to something else which previously wasn't worth it.
And some of those solutions may be distinctly unlegal, even at the highest levels of the class, but enormously difficult to detect especially if the people responsible aren't particularly co-operative. (In one year in NASCAR, the season winner ran a car that was 9/10ths scale, which should have been obvious but they managed to arrange things so it was never seen up alongside a full size competitor. The next year NASCAR introduced body gauges!)
It isn't restricted to Rotax though. In at least one other class a regularly fast driver had two engines with identical numbers. One was 110cc for use in the heats and one was 100cc for use in the final, where his advantage came from the grid position.
|
|