Dear Joe
I'm not arguing just let me tell you my reality once Picco is past for us.
For 15 years(1980-1995) Picco was number 1 for most of us and take a look to the number of Picco victories in the r/cboat world.
During that time I represented Picco and took pride to run their products but since the release of the EXR problems started to be a routine with the consecutively changes of parts.. a real mess.
You must remember that spare parts were changed without notice every three months pushing people to buy new engines.
THe very first P45 Exr black head serie is a good example once just 6 months later was substituted by the Blue head with internal mods too.
I spent many U$ in 1999 with a bunch of EXR engines(21-45-67-80-90) more than 40 motors IN USA some from CMD,Rocket city,Al's Hobbs and others ,i.e.,imported by the US distributor,and never had any reply for our failures lot of them during simple break in.
In the other hand I prompltly replaced kits for my customers waiting for the supposed support of O'Donnel......
Some of the broken parts showing clearly problems in the cast went to him and for months never had any phone call response or e-mail....
So we decided that the broken parts should be send directly to Italy and only then under lot of excuses we had some of them replaced for free and believe me even being replaced many boaters decided to give up on Picco .
There are still few 21 and 45 running competitively in our club but we do know that they will be replaced by CMB or Mac in a near future due to the lack of spare parts.
That's the reason we,more than 30 guys in my district,run Mac's sucessfully since its release without any single failure and easy to know that CMD is committed with mac customers at any time.
Kind regards
Gill