Jan, it might sound weird but I am sure that the problems with broken valve springs on S2000 cars were real and not that uncommon.

On the other hand I think that only few times Fabia (the car with the longest stroke - 92 mm) suffered from broken conrod and that was due to a faulty batch of them. Otherwise even with brutal overrewing usually something else broke.

The long stroke actually doesn't apply to 1.6 WRC engines built from scratch (usually bore/stroke around 83/73). The only 1.6 WRC engine with long stroke was Mini due to the fact that it was the only one based on production unit (PSA/BMW EP6CDT).