TC02C exposed spur and pinion

[Clive Loynes]

Originally Posted by Stickygeko

Guys beware - im sure its not BRCA legal to have your spur gear exposed

Agreed but if the body shell covers it then that is enough.

[buggy#0]

Originally Posted by Stickygeko

Guys beware - im sure its not BRCA legal to have your spur gear exposed

I suppose it would come down to the semantics of what "exposed" actually means. The motor plate definitely doesn't need to be covered if it's a lay-down car, as the back of the shell does that job, but a few cars that have raced in Europe - namely the first SRX-2 MH prototype and the first factory B5M conversions - have had gaping holes at the back that left the spur more than visible. It's definitely illegal to have a spur protruding from the car, but exposed doesn't necessarily mean it protrudes.

Take Cragg's B5M as an example. This is his car alongside the others at the Worlds warm-up - I would expect such a rule to be widely enforced across all governing bodies, I haven't actually read the JMRCA regulations - but it's quite clear that the spur sits exposed to the naked eye, and definitely has no form of external protection. It looks to fully clear the main chassis plate before the rear arm too, so I would say that it's protruding.

B5M_YB_0248.jpg

If you look at the car when it ran at Kidderminster, however, you'll see it has a gear cover of sorts that just goes over the top of the spur, but it leaves the pads and the top shaft/spring/nut exposed - it may well not even fully cover the edge of the spur, it's hard to tell from the angle. Clearly this has been done to make it fully legal for BRCA meetings, but if you take the regulations at face value, it doesn't really meet "closed and protected". It's only partially closed at best, and certainly isn't fully protected.

BRCA-Kiddy-2WD-cars.jpg

The bottom line in the case of the OP is that a gear cover is advisable, but not strictly necessary. Because it's not a lay-down car, there will be more spur exposed than the example above, but I have seen several people run cars like that, indoors and outdoors. Whether it's legal or not is a different matter. If you ever want to race with the car, it would be daft not to run one, and for a BRCA meeting you would definitely need to do something. If for whatever reason you can't source a particular gear cover, or have a unique motor plate/gearbox, a shell that doesn't cover the back end fully, it looks to be entirely possible to fashion something that makes the car legal. A bent strip of lexan attached to the back of the motor plate that comes down over the edge of the spur would be along the lines of the above photo, so that would likely be legal. The rule is just open to interpretation, so it would be entirely dependent on whoever is scrutineering your car and how they interpret the wording.

I know it seems a bit trivial for such a basic thing, but there's a fine line between falling foul of it and being legal. In the OP's case it's easy to stay legal, and it's the easiest thing to do, but the wider rule is an interesting thing to analyse.

[Clive Loynes]

Good detective work there Felix.

Personnally I would say that if the marshals are likely to get their fingers on rotating machinery then it needs more in the way of guarding! When an eight year old marshal loses the end of a finger and the parents bring legal action I guess we will find out what was really meant.

Dadio, for his part, was only ever suggesting that he might run without a gear cover for bashing purposes but Chris Larner advised that his spur and pinion would suffer in a dusty environment.