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I was really pleased to read this, as it's about time some common sense was applied to us club competitors - for years now we've been forced to follow the same standards as professional racers, whose equipment probably gets 10 times more use/abuse than many of us occasional racers subject ours to. In my opinion, there should be a completely different set of rules for club competitors, and they should have nothing to do with anything the FIA says.
It really galls me having to consign equipment to the scrapheap that has often had very little use, simply because some arbitrary date set by FIA has passed, and the MSA have simply blindly followed suit.
The latest thing on the list, of course, is the updates to the extinguisher rules - perhaps someone at the MSA could now apply some common sense to to this, and scrap the whole idea. For years, we've been able to run our extinguishers as long as the needle shows in the green. I'm not aware of any instances where such an extinguisher has failed to operate when needed, so why all of a sudden are we being forced to meet FIA standards and replace yet more equipment that is fully functional? Jobs for the boys? From what I've read, anecdotally, these modern extinguishers aren't much use anyway, so why are we being forced to fork out yet more cash for something that's not likely to do much good even if we did need it?
Dave Richards, as the new chief at the MSA, has pledged to improve matters for the 'grass-roots' competitor, so I think it's time some of these rules were re-appraised and the amount of use a typical club racer subjects stuff to should be taken into account.
Incidentally, I think the ruling about seats is specific to rallying because, at national level or lower, I believe rallying is the only discipline where the seats are currently lifed anyway. As club racers, our seats don't (currently...) have to be FIA certified.
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