Here's your problem.... Members of the CFR group told me that I should not do anything as he is a good guy.
It's a cultural norm established by the group. My conversations with David made it pretty clear to me that there was - and I would presume still is - a much more liberal interpretation prevails, that operationalizes everyday applications of the IT ruleset. It struck me then that it was (is) very much like what we applied in the Northwest in the '80s - that the rulebook was more a set of guidelines.
Hell, I "won" an ITC championship in a car that wasn't even listed in the ITCS because it was too new...
That played there then, and seems to play now in FL, like the unwritten rule that David explained to me, wherein anything that "isn't required for a race car" (e.g., hatch support struts) can be removed for weight. That simply is not in the written rules but the culture has chosen de facto to allow it.
K
EDIT - There's an additional dimension to this, as well - kind of the "broken windows" dynamic. A culture that allows easy obvious cheats enables individuals to push just a little further with their personal applications of the philosophy. If I hear from everyone that it's OK to take the hatch struts out of my car absent any allowance to do so, it's probably OK for me to mix and match the readily available alternate VW gear ratios floating around out there.
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