We did attempt to make it more clear last year. Intakes in front of the AFM have always been unrestricted, so this has always been de facto legal, but it was made more specific last year from a rules change request. There are other areas to get ram air - from the front bumper where the turn signal used to be, underneath the spoiler, the high pressure are in the cowl (cowl induction! ) etc. I'm interested in opinions on wether the $20 or so in parts that ram air costs is worth regulating this, and if so, how. Racers are always looking for more power, so if we want to regulate this, it needs to be very specific, and close all the loopholes. Looking foward to what the opinions are on this.

This rule is not broken. I see no need to fix it. It is cheap and easy.

Please dont fix something that is not broken.

And just so we can see what has been being developed in the HP department here is a chart from RennList a few years ago.

members.rennlist.com/m758/944SpecDynoCharts.htm


This is the natural progression of how it works. Little things are found all the time. A good Spec Miata car was 104 RWHP in the early days. Now over 120 RWHP.

Not having new pistons to work with is a bonus for us. It will help control HP.

I agree that there is no need to adjust the rule. It is cheap and easy to fabricate something and tough to regulate intakes.

My opinion on air intake or anything else that changes the cars performance small or large is this...The intent of the founding fathers of this class was cheap and equal cars, try to think of all changes in this scenerio... lets take 200 drivers by a Hertz rental and rent 200 mustangs, you go racing and then after a couple of races, somebody puts ram air on their rental car now that person is going 4mph faster and finishes ahead of some person that they didn't finish ahead of in the previous races, so now since everybody is sharing information, the other 199 drivers add the same type of ram air, now all 200 cars are going 4mph faster...so why bother? If all 200 drivers don't make the same identical change, now your cars have gotten just a little bit of difference in them which goes against what our founding fathers tried to create and why many of us got into 944spec. If 200 cars are racing with 145hp/145tq is that really more fun than running 200 cars with 135/135??? I really don't think so. I am not voting against ram air in this note, just making a point that where does it end and how do we keep the cars as equal as possible.

Norm - I agree with your sentiments, and it's why this put out there to get feedback. The most equal is to go back to stock airboxes only, and if we were writing the rules from scratch today, we might word the rules that way. Again the regulatory issue is the difficult one, and forcing people to backdate their cars, at a cost. If there is a strong feeling that we should go back, it could be considered, but remembering the pain that recalling aftermarket headers & chips caused, we shouldn't take that lightly.

In any case, we may need to further define ram air so people don't start showing up with enormous scoops sticking out of their foglights, for example.