Darin, I'll bite. haha Pachmeyer used to tell me that I knew nothing about FE because all I was doing was hosting the biggest FE race in the country year after year in my own back yard. If I wanted to know what was really going on in FE I needed to go to gas races. Um..........what?
I am a 36X60 fan all the way. I suggested a cap of $100 but I guess it would only complicate the rules.
This is going to happen. I proposed it to our gang yesterday and asked them to find flaws with the thinking. They're all in. This is what we should have done from the start. Hind sight. In our defense, it was winter of 2008-2009. There weren't decent $100 motors on every website back then. The cost was a concern but a cap on the cost wont work. What do you use? MSRP? The price on fleabay? The sale at Hobbyking? On race day the CD looks in a boat and sees motor x,y,z. What's the price on that? Guy has a receipt showing he paid $100. Do I spend the time to go on line and find it to see if the number is legit? PIA
As for FE not taking off. It did and it has. Some people can't make it work. It's not the boats though. It's their crap attitudes. Anybody want to hang out with negative Nancy? Ugh. Moving along. We ran 45 heats yesterday for a tiny little club gig. 5 of 7 classes ran the spec motors. Number of motor failures........zero. I've been to 4 IMPBA travel events in two years. So not my home pond........ Gracious hosts. Thanks to all. The Spring NATS in Atlanta had more FE entries than gas and nitro. So............failing? We could have fielded more classes at the CanAm but their gang preferred to keep the classes with an even mix if they could. Makes sense. It's a mixed event. We had some guys bail too so it worked out.
Of those 4 IMPBA events I attended the majority of the FE entries were.............limited. "Yeah Terry, but what rules do you use?" They all followed the NAMBA rule set. Clearly it's horrible.
Back when Newland wrote the rule and our district proposed it there were really only 2 decent manufacturers of RTR's. Those were Proboat and Aquacraft. Made sense to us at the time to provide a landing pad for guys that went into the hobby store and bought a boat. No they weren't going to stomp a mud hole in our butts. Who does with their first boat? They come out and play. They hang with good people. Have some fun. Laugh. Act a fool. They watch, learn, ask questions. We teach them to be faster. They learn to drive. It pisses some off that Newland and I wanted the RTR's to be part of the equation but it is a fact. This worked too. It held together longer than we thought it would. Limited numbers were and still are the most contested classes in FE.
Unfortunately the idea had a shelf life. A number of things we got wrong that have bit us on the behind too. Peterson is right to a degree. We did get it wrong in multiple regards. I just prefer to see 5+ years of decent participation as a positive. Glass is half full.
So what went wrong?
Supply of motors for one. We really do as racers push right out to the edge. It's racing right? We're not playing tiddlywinks. When you're close to the edge, any differences from one run of motors to the next will get exposed. A quality shift of 6 or 7% might be a melted motor. You can't replace the bearings per the rules so if they get sketchy you buy another motor. New motor, same setup, and it fries. So dial it back right? Yeah right. Your racing a guy who has a motor from the earlier batch. We're racers remember. Been there. Done that. Got the pile of motors to prove it. If you bought a motor and it SUCKED, you might think "maybe I got a bad one". If you got 4 in row like that you'd buy a different brand right? Unless the rules require you to buy from only two places. One motor isn't competitive and the other is going to spontaneously com bust. Ugh. Can you smell the frustration? It's wafting across lake MI in my direction.
Second, a manufacturers' dedication is to the dollar. Period. Racing makes up such a small percentage of their market it's not even a line item. When Proboat made the decision to drop a whole motor line to save a few dollars..........they just did it. Some of the motors on the list aren't actually available at all. With Mike Z. gone, Aquacraft to my knowledge isn't developing anything new. Their market share will continue to shrink as a result. Their competitors are developing new exciting stuff that will out sell the old UL1 for instance. See where I'm going with this? The supply of AQ 2030 and 1800 motors "could" easily vanish. Then what? We'll have a list and no motors to buy that are on it. Blew it on this front.
Third. Another mistake we made with the list itself was that we linked ourselves to just two manufacturers. See above. The list has gotten tight already. Although it accomplished what Dave and I had hoped it wasn't right to write rules that in effect catered to any manufacturer. Hind sight again.
Making the change to size will make it much like the other fuel sources. Fuel classes have size limits correct? So why not a size for limited FE classes? Super easy to tech too. Another bonus to just limiting the size is that new manufacturers that come along don't have to jump through a hoop to please a tiny little segment of their market. New potential racers are more likely to end up with a boat from the store or on line that fits in without changing a motor.
The boats may and probably will get a little faster over time but there's still only so much power you can extract from the size limit. Couple that with the 34" boat length limit and you can only go SO fast and finish. You could buy a motor that will hold up for a while. Peoples existing fleets will still be legal but if they hurt a motor they have a choice. No catering. Just more sensible to most that have talked about it.