mikeyb13 wrote:My 160bhp peugeot 205 is gonna look the part in the next National Time Attack Series
You have the expense arguement all back to front.
Sticking a half decent engine in a cheap shell is what people who cant afford caterhams do. To put it in perspective my entire engine conversion on the 205 cost less than the price of a set of harnesses for the Lotus and less than half the price my mate paid for an uprated Turbo for his Subaru.
Fair dues, there's an exception to every rule. However, classes are designed around homologated road cars and it's always been the case in competition that to maintain the status of a homologated car, the engine block at least must be as fitted to the original vehicle. I can see the frustration in this case, but in most classes of racing then letting you swap out engines would open the door to a pure chequebook class. These exist, of course - classes for race cars. In a road car class, you're supposed to be looking at close relations of what you can buy from a dealer. There has to be a line between a modified road car and a custom built race car and the blue book has really set that line at sticking with the engine block and layout as manufactured.
Your Pug wouldn't take much to get compliant with the regs if you wanted to run that, you'd just be running as a race car.
Edit - just properly read the thread from the beginning to see that this series only accepts "production" cars. Fair enough - can see your frustration, but the rule isn't a new one. Shame there wasn't a catch-all class for folks who wanted a bit of competition without going down the full sprints and hills route. TBH Mikey, your Pug would probably run well in sprints? Not quite the Time Attack event programme, but still cheap competition where you could probably do okay - would be in a class that you couldn't win, but from all I've seen of the hillclimb scene in particular, it's not the overall wins that matter to most, but the personal competition with your closest competitor...
