Interestingly, or not maybe, the micro section had a season where 4wd's with front drive shafts or front diff/front centre drive shaft removed became dominant in their 2wd class. The rules were subsequently written to state that only a stacked gearbox transmission was allowed in the 2wd class.
The argument here was that the disconnected front end of the transmission did give an advantage, and in fact I think at one point the rumours were that a one way diff was fitted backwards to give some sort of braking advantage or something (although I might have made that up completely from snippets of many random trackside chats that happened at that time about it) but you get the point!
I'm not sure that rule stills stands entirely, but for me there were/are other factors at play there....
The 2wd class in the micro section was, and still is, lacking in production race cars to fit into the class...so the rule book is being developed all the time in the hope it promotes the class and generates enough industry interest for manufacturers to take it up properly and create a fair class of 2wd micro racing...
At that point, the 4wd class had some reasonably well developed race cars competing...they maxed the cars out on wheelbase and track width, and were competing very closely as it was, and still is the main micro class.
The 2wd class at that time had no 2wd 'race' cars...only a few randomly built/converted 'toy' cars that happened to fit very loosely into the scrutineering box. Pretty sure Chunk (the first proper BRCA rule designed 2wd micro race car) didn't quite exist at that point.
Those 2wd 4wd cars with their developed design/proportions wiped the floor with the other 2wd's...so it was deemed unfair. The result was the Chunk coming to the front of it, and hopefully a more serious class that manufacturers can design properly for now...if they can find a market to sell them to!
|