Quote Originally Posted by bill hollingsworth View Post
Re the spare wheel rule is probably a carry over from what a sports car is or was. When the World Sports Car Championship started in 1953 cars such as the production Austin Healey competed but pretty quickly factory "specials" appeared changing the character of the class. To maintain some semblance of a sports car rather than a factory prototype things such as a spare wheel, luggage capacity and windscreen height were enforced. Of course the entry of factory specials spelt the demise of production cars and the escalation of the sport from amateur to professional status. As a kid I saw the Ferrari P4 race at Longford where it was in a class of its own. It is ironic that sports car races at the time were often one horse races whereas the production sports car races were gladiatorial events.
Sports Car regulations the world over seem to be full of arcane and obscure rules, no doubt with some basis in long gone road car regulations. When I was at Le Mans in 1976 with Alain de Cadenet's Lola base prototype, we were horrified to discover during scrutineeering that there was a rule that required the car to perform a figure of eight within a certain boundary. This detail had escaped de Cad and there was no way the car came close to being able to comply.

Kiwi solution; crank about 4 inches of toe in on the front and while pushing the car, surreptitiously lift the inside front corner! With a French shrug, the scrutineer signed it off as passed.

It always seemed to me that most of the Le Mans regulations were there to advantage French entries and make it hard for anyone else. Shades of the Australian ADR regs?