From: tim900 .....--... Re: Road Racings Engine End Case Rules
on 30/01/2008 at 10:09 PM
Come to a Club level meeting , where the latest model bikes are 4 - 5 years old , and the vast majority older.No aftermarket bolt-on end covers available for these machines......
Are we really going to ask our scrutineers to determine that the original mounting integrity of our OEM crankcases / covers has not been compromised by the addition of bolt on plates ? Two bolts ???? Ha !Hope they are Hi-tensile......
Someone , please advise me of instances where an engine case has been holed ( that wasn't due to the failure of internal components) that has resulted in a delay at a Road Race meeting in Australia in recent years .
Actually it happens on a very regular basis Tim, I can only speak from a ASC perspective though and we would have long delays at nearly every race meeting at least once per round and sometimes 2 to 3 times over the three days. It has been such a problem over the year's that we purchased in bulk an expensive oil soaker product from the US that absorbs oil off of the track and carried sacks of it around with us from round to round to minamise the down time while tracks are cleaned properly of oil leaks caused from crashes.
I guess the issue really became focussed at the last round of the series last year when a rider fell on the last lap of a race got up and rode to the chequered flag dropping oil all over an already wet track. This caused many crashes to happen, from memory about 4 or 5 other bikes crashed on his oil, causing even more oil leaks and more to the point this could have caused a number of serious injuries we were lucky as the track was that wet that these poor people in general only slid down the road but it caused large amounts of damage to peoples bikes and riding gear that houldn't have happened.
At that event we had delays of up to 4 hours just on the Sunday while oil leaks were cleaned up and half of the final rounds deciding races had t be abandoned. This new rule wasn't a knee jerk reaction though to a one off affair as the road race commission had set in place the beginnings of rule changes for heavy duty case ends when the met in March some six months before the final round. From what I'm told similar rules are quiet common elsewhere around the world and have been for sometime because of similar issues. I always loath saying that certain changes are based on improving safety because safety is often used as an excuse to further a persons own agenda when their argument is weak, but in this instance any rule change that causes less crashes has got to be a good thing for all riders wouldn't you say?
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Re: Road Racings Engine End Case Rules 
Re: End cases (tim900) 01/30 10:09 PM 