I almost think this thread would be best off in 'Chit Chat', because it's worth discussing a variety of motorsports in it.

I have come to think that while innovation and the onward march of development in motorsport are great in themselves, they have often been detrimental to the sporting element, and even to the continued long-term existence of those sports. Take rallying as an example. Some, I know, feel that Lancia started to take it away from its essence of being a competition between versions of existing production models when it introduced the Stratos, but I think the arrival of four-wheel-drive with the Audi Quattro is probably the more important 'milestone'. There followed directly the Group B 'supercars' which were probably unsustainable on cost grounds and gave the sport a bad name after Henri Toivonen's fatal accident. The adoption of Group A as the primary class in world rallying in 1987 was a good thing, in my view, but again the natural pace of development resumed and costs spiralled, leading to today's crisis in the WRC. In touring cars, the huge amounts of money spent by the Schnitzer BMW team and then Alfa to win the British championship moved the goalposts completely. Alfa's use of wings on the 155, thanks to the team's clever interpretation of the homologation requirements, made it unique at first but the following year everybody had them. The costs of what became Super Touring soon went out of control and it was effectively dead five-six years later.

In the cases of post-Group B rallying and post-Super Touring touring cars, the solution was to cut costs and make the cars less technologically advanced. It worked for a bit — a season, in my opinion — in rallying, and it seems to be working very well in touring cars thanks to Super 2000. S2000 seems to be the solution to some of world rallying's problems, too, but I'm afraid I think that key to its longer-term success in terms of keeping things close and competitive will be a lack of opportunity to interpret the rules in 'clever' ways. This is what Audi was able to do with the Quattro in rallying, and Alfa with the 155 Silverstone in touring cars, and in both cases the floodgates were opened. The inevitable result? Rising costs and falling sustainability.