Hmm, gashead, you could be right but I believe more because many of top junior drivers have already switched.
I think Shane, who does the kartingdad blog, hit the nail on the head, on his latest blog post. Basically those who had the very best dd engines, have probably already switched and the tag against the very best of the best dd's probably is a fair fight. And there seems good consistency and parity between new fiched tag motors.
But and it is a fair but, that pool of top flight junior engines gets smaller every year because if you accept the best dd engine is new cnc barrel on old small bearing crank, each some go bang, recking the crankcase/crank and some get converted to extreme, where again the small bearing crank is still desirable.
The top teams, never really liked the big bearing dd engine, feeling they were never fully on the pace (more crank inertia)
Equally the clutched engine, for the same reason, was always considered to be at even more of a disadvantage. (Even more crank assembly inertia)
So yes, if you've been competing for the last couple of seasons on a clutched engine and one of the guys you normally battle with, gets a new fiched tag, he will jump ahead of you in performance. Less so but still to some extent, if you had a big bearing dd engine. If you'd had the absolute, best of the best small bearing dd, you probably would see negligible change.
I'd did post somewhere and email tal-ko, that I thought the standard clutched engine had become the poor relation because it had some of the extra inertia of the tag but none of the performance boost and I did argue that it should probably get some but not all of that boost i.e just the exhaust or just the cylinder head (or they could stick the starter ring on and let it run with both as it'd then all the inertia downside of the tag)
Bottom line, I believe tal-ko have done the right thing with the tag, it had to be relaunched with all the performance of the very best dd engines, otherwise there would have been no take-up. To me, the people at the biggest disadvantage, probably knew they were at some disadvantage already, I'm not saying that's a good thing but paddock talk has always been that the clutched engine was weaker (but more driver friendly), maybe less so about the big bearing engine but those in the know, the teams, have never favoured it. I think the current unrest, is more the result of so many "strong" tag engines hitting the grids in a small period of time.
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