Ray, i value your experience, may not always agree but i know i'll get a straight answer after-all you've been doing this for awhile!! Our HMC car pool is alot less than ERC maybe 30 if where lucky and thats not counting the builds underway but out of those 30 some require work to become legal but usually this is not much!! the one area i do agree is some are merely just happy to "own and show" there cars and i've now figured some of these guys out and stopped wasting time on them. Incorporating the U3L saloons is fantastic and show case's how NZ saloon car racing use to be so we will continue with this and some of the U3L guys get a kick out of beating the bigger cars!! we do allow Schedule K/Appendix K certified cars in but they also have vanished? is this just a sign of the times?

Compared to historic racing overseas our HMC rules are reasonably free and easy and due to economics we have allowed the likes of wilwood calipers, aftermarket gearbox's, replacement engine components, etc which allows for easier builds so i don't see this as been too restrictive, if i had my way I'd want the air in the tyres to be from 1960, LOL but as we know that would never work in NZ!! on the other hand if we just adopted a no enforcement rule on the regs we would merely be going down the same road of the other muscle car groups and that been the case why bother then!! with our bigger muscle type cars the modern aftermarket compontry available to increase the performance in all directions can be huge, i can put another 100 HP into my car just by added a set of modern aftermarket cylinder heads for $3K, this is what must stop(hope you get the idea of what im saying here) so restrictive, i don't think so!!

Of the U3L cars the only one excluded from the Festival was Angus because his over driving style and the damaged he cause to 3 cars at the previous festival, this seemed the rite call as we had one incident over both weekends racing this year and even that was minor, otherwise i've had great racing with him but everyone else with a complying vehicle was allowed or are there other U3L cars i don't know about? the previous festival we had a 43 car grid(with 7 Aussies) and this was way too much!! oh well!! the ups and downs of motorsport!! anyway Ray, your input and ideas are valued and thats because i respect someone thats out there doing it.

Dale M