Brian here is a quiz for you - guess whose engines got thrown out at Buckmore on Sunday for illegal timing in the Honda Cadets? 1st and 3rd place finishers both.
Now the Pro Extreme infomarketing executives who seem to populate this place and the social media with increasing frequency will most likely hold that up as a reason why we should all bow down to the brave new world of one tuner, one dyno, one love. Its certainly a cunningly placed piece of marketing, but the idea of sacrificing two of your own customers to prove a point in Kelvins backyard leaves many of us clubmen wondering what next is to come in this so called revolution. We've already seen it railroaded into EPEC, time will tell if thats a fatal blow, but it certainly is for the GX160 users. Then we've seen the killing off of Kartmania HC as an MSA GX160 entity with an insidious withdrawal of a certain tuners customers, again who does that benefit, only the Pro Extreme idea. Of course the next chapter in that sad saga will be the Pro Extreme series going National, presumably as part of the EPEC and then miraculously gaining the Kartmania title and claiming to be the foremost Prokart sprint champs in the country.
Presumably the final stage of this is to get MSA approval for next year to legitimise the whole thing, and also take over the Honda Cadet market. And thats where this plan falls down - although the apologists will claim this is like Rotax, or TKM or Iame its not because this idea rely's on only one tuner, one dyno, its a closed shop.
Why should we all have to get rid of our 160's? Why should we have to stop tuning our own engines? or for the guys who use a tuner break that relationship? And why should they have to go to a tuner who many of them have either had a bad experience with or worse had engines come back with 'different personalities' for want of a better phrase.
Its like some sort of fait accompli where the death of the GX160 has been pre-ordained by one tuner in a churlish response to Kelvins attempts to bring the rest of the field closer to their SPs in terms of performance. For most of us that seemed like a good idea, we are clubmen not frontrunners in the EPEC, S1 Honda or whatever, all we want is our engines to be a little nearer to those who choose to spend 2k+ on generator engines.
Having Pro Extreme forced down our necks, and in the underhand way its now being done is not palatable. Its like some sort of kids movie where the baddie is blatantly obvious to us, yet a lot of you kids seem to be being taken in. All we can shout is 'He's behind you!'
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