If the Cup does continue I personally think it would be worth at least considering rolling the cut-off dates forward to allow newer cars in (obviously still Tamiya only). A big motivation for that might be the dwindling numbers of affordable "service" parts for some cars (try to find a stock TA04 diff pulley at all, much less one costing less than eleventy billion pounds) as well as the cars themselves. Of course Tamiya might suddenly start re-releasing on-road cars rather than just buggies but I'm not holding my breath there. The other thing is that chassis like the TA05 (in all its myriad variations), TB03 and FF03 are all somewhat orphaned at the moment as they don't fit in the vintage regs but they're now largely outclassed at club level too so they're not getting out so much. And spares support is still plentiful for them. Moving the clock forward a bit more and the same will apply to the TB04, TA06/7 (and even the M07 Concept). One of the things that got me back into on road racing was spectating at a Super Production Cup meeting and being amazed close (and how fast) the racing was among the 17.5 brushless FF03 cars. And I'm betting they didn't worry about age-brittle ABS plastic shock towers cracking at all (says the man suspiciously eyeing up his FF01). Just my two penneth, please feel free to disregard.
|