They are an excellent example of how a good competitive class lifts everybody's standard. Also lap records from years which have particularly close competition, eg '74/75 for FF often stand for quite a while until another super competitive year comes along or there is some technological breakthrough. The current crop of wide track cars are actually really quick and the best legal historic, ie pre '86, car is quite a few seconds away no matter how well driven.

I went to Philip Island a couple of years ago for the 40th anniversary of FF in Aus to help Phil Foulkes who runs one of my old Pallisers. Most of the front runners were young kids from the Aus National FF series using the historics to get more mileage and boy did they take it seriously!

You may well be right about TRS cars diluting the FF series. For what its worth, I think the TRS concept is fantastic and wish something similar was around in my day. The extra speed from using more revs in an Atlantic spec BDA (and corresponding shorter engine life) was huge.