What I meant Bruce was that the Alfa Trofeo members and many of those in the area, with a bit of rule tweaking, the T & C rules would cover almost all cars. As they stand now, as I said before, the devil is in the detail and that detail is what schedule K/Appendix K is for. Running a pure car to those rules few people will disagree with.
You then have to ask what T & C is actually there for and when you go through the rules, line by line, word by word which we did some years ago, you see the anomalies, especially if you take a close look a car that most would accept, as being legitimate for this type of racing, but would not get a CoD.
We have said it many, many times before, but race meeting organisers and series organisers are always free to TIGHTEN the overall rules if they so wish. We simply state that some form of roll protection is mandatory in the faster group, as full cages effectively turn a road car into a race car and can destroy the classic value. We also made harnesses mandatory but backed off with just an advisory on any form of neck restraint.
Whilst the purists think that everything should be 100% pre 1977 - but choose to fit rev limiters and shift lights and run cars with heaps more horsepower than they ever had in period - they have no right to push people into getting an expensive piece of paper that proves absolutely nothing about the legitimacy of an engine's innards!
Yes, we will always beg to differ on philosophy, but take the number of words pushing for CoDs over the last 20 years or so (TACCOC's meetings up until about three years ; the original Arrow Wheels Series; U3L saloons; HMC etc) and the fact that 2/3rds of racers at the average race meeting haven't bought into the system, is far more telling than the single race at the first meeting of the season, that accounts for 20% of the year's programme for some.
As long as promoters put on well supported, financially viable meetings, then the whole T & C and CoD issue is a side show to appease a few well meaning and passionate purists, but it has yet to be proved that the system has been success, other than for those with genuine historic cars or those with a race history, needing a documented provenance for the future.
As someone pointed out the other day, other than the engine builder, who really knows what is under the bonnet, how old it is and even what the cubic capacity is? If it is indeed chocolate fish racing...
I'm sure many have gone through the 14 page CoD application and been unable to answer some of the required questions honestly.
Arthur Vowles (previous co-ordinator) has for a long time championed changes to the system that have been totally ignored, especially for those in the early stages of racing a car that they may later develop. If the CoD has any validity at all, then those updates need documenting in a simplified and cost free format.
Some items in the T & C rules are so petty as to be laughable and do not even reflect what actually happened in period.
As just about all classes at local meetings are now 'Series Classes', then the real power is in "Series Rules", not T & C.
Yes, I know I sound like a long playing record stuck in a groove, but whereas Schedule 'K' has some validity for many cars, certainly Appendix K doesn't cover some of the cars being raced today, because they weren't homologated at the time.
I have given up debating the validity of T & C with the H & C Committee, but as long as the cars have somewhere to race amongst like runners or even those vastly different, and the drivers don't employ dodgem car tactics, all is sweet, north and south of the Bombays.
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Originally Posted by AMCO72
