K37 debate is wide, but indeed LMA could well be a good place to resort to, albeit against Super Tourers, it could be that another berth is required.
The K37 rules thing is a load of legal @rse covering. Here's an unedited letter I sent to Motorsport News earlier this year, which undermines the whole excercise and shows the hypocrisy in the respective FIA/MSA stances.
Version printed was sanitised and removed the Focus/McRae/Burton references.
"Rallying: K37 or KO?
Ref the the K37 issue (MN, Feb 21), John Richardson hangs the fundamental rationale for the whole issue around a legislative culture. Fine. Except the changes don’t come in until Jan 2010.
So what are the implications if, or when, the unthinkable happens, before 2010, and a legal eagle picks a blank cheque fight with the MSA or its insurer? If, and only if, the legislative risk is so high, are there any excuses for K37 having not been modified immediately? Or is this not the real reason? It needs to sound credible, and this delay doesn’t.
Rallying gets ever more expensive, so why should skilled hands not continue to convert cars in whatever innovative and inexpensive way, when the alternative of using production examples would be far more costly?
Off hand, I can think of several cars with altered floorpans, inverted chassis rails, RWD conversions, big tunnels and all sorts of innovative fundamental modifications. Andy Burton takes the headlines, but what about the ‘Rovaru’, or any number of hybrid cars in use, or mothballed and waiting to reappear? Will Colin McRae be forced to stop using his ground breaking Mk2 Escort? Will there be a raft of compensatory payments to owners of potentially redundant Escort G3 and G4s across the land?
If you tie the hands of rallyists to production-based machines, you’ll continue to drive the costs up, and everyone will be so sick of the whole thing, that they’ll all be doing rallycross or tipping the lot. If the WRC is anything to go by, this cost issue needs a rapid re-think.
Scrap this K37 nonsense, deal with the disclaimers, and logbook cars as you’ve always done, and pay the damn insurance premiums. Trees don’t get any softer, Motorsport is Dangerous, Lawyers get busier, but accidents remain accidents.
As for the WRC, I suggest you lobby the FIA to bin the WRC cars, and substitute with Super 2000. It costs less, and that’s got to be a good thing in this potty age where we’re prepared to see £450k WRC Focus’s hand constructed, panel by panel, around space-frame rollcages. Yes, panel by panel, to paraphrase Christian Loriaux from an another source (edit: a 3rd party claim which I now doubt).
All of which leaves me wondering what’s the FIA’s legislative stance is on those pseudo “production” Focuses. Pah, “production”? A rather cunning welded Mecano replica it seems, 'allegedly!', and hardly safe legal ground at all."