You are arguing my point. If the powers that be are arguing to bring in new blood why are we making comps that only satisfy the top teir drivers. And your comment about buying a win is neive at best. If you can win with a stock truck why did you spend all that time upgrading and tuning? Jake drove with the losi pin tires that are all the rage now for a very long while before they were available to the rest of us. Not saying it is wrong just stating a fact. And if you can say with a straight face that the top drivers are driving trucks that dont cost 1000+ you are just kidding yourself. I never once whined about guys having better equipment i argued that to get new blood in the sport you have to make it accesable to everyone. I am a member of this community just like you. I support the vendors, and the big companies just like you and my opinion counts just as much as yours. Just because it runs counter to your Ideal dosnt make it any less relevent.
The problem with your facts is that they simply aren't true.
Jake ran pin tires that he built himself. He (and I think Nabil) developed those by gluing pin treads to Comp Claw sidewalls. Sure, they got to test the Boss Claws before they were released, but that was more due to the R&D part of the process than to have some unfair advantage. The fact is that most of the time that they had pins before they went to market, they were making them themselves. That really isn't any different than the HB Khoas treads that I glued to Sedona sidewalls that I have on my berg. About the only time people had tires that nobody else could get were when Panther offered their drivers the super sticky cougars or when HB released their Sedonas to their drivers a month or so early.
You're so shortsited, though, that you see this as some sort of unfair advantage. Being a team driver and being handed a tire to run (wasn't it at Worlds '09?) isn't always a good thing. Personally, I hated the Sedona when I first ran it. It took alot of tuning to make it into the tire that I now like. If I'd received one of the first sets, I'd probably have performed worse because of it.
Unlike other forms of RC racing, you see quite the opposite in crawling. I'll use Krawlfreak as an example here. You can contact him and buy the same chassis that he ran at any number of national events. This is the exact same chassis that any one of his team drivers are using. Then, pull up his build thread and take a look at his exact setup used in different weather or rock conditions. He's shown exactly what components, electronics, length links, link positions, shock oil and springs, etc. You'll find similiar from looking at several of his team drivers' build threads, T1e's team drivers' build threads, etc. The attitude within this hobby is sooooo incredibly removed from the rest of the hobby in that regard.
Sure, there might be one or two products that a vendor or a couple drivers have that were too expensive or impractical from a vendor to produce in mass, but within this hobby, people don't keep secrets or hoard product like you're suggesting. What you're claiming as fact is a bold faced lie.
2nd point, you made was about my statement regarding truck to driver...You have to be able to comprehend the bigger picture before you can discount my statement about 85% driver & 15% truck.
First off, I'm not saying you're going to win with out of the box, stock, untuned crap. You still need a decent truck, but it doesn't have to be an exotic materials, one-off, all custom, 5lb, $2000 crawler.
Within my club, I could probably take my old sportsman (a 1st generation chump chassis with only a handfull of upgrades (servo, over under gears, and cvd's)) or the 2 year old, very basic moonbuggy berg and still win our Am class and probably beat about half of the pro class drivers. However, that other half of the Pro class is much closer in skill level to myself. And that's where the extra tweaks come in.
Still not all of those tweaks are necessary to win. I like tinkering and trying new things. Honestly, i probably have far less in my berg than most guys with similiar trucks, but I've also done alot of the work myself. I'm still not sponsored by anybody who provides me with unobtainable parts. However, I feel that I'm capable of competing with even the top guys.
It's really all attitude, and quite frankly, your defeatist attitude sucks.
