Quote Originally Posted by AnttiL View Post
Can we leave the personal battles behind and move over to something else? Maybe even *sigh* discuss George Donaldson's idea of moving to R5's.

What Donaldson suggests is that they put a bigger restrictor to get more horsepower, and just reinforce the parts which wouldn't withstand the increased power. I'm not saying it's impossible, but sure not as simple as he makes it sound like.
I know we've talked about the R5+ idea before and this forum have written it off, but I'd love to know from someone who ran the actual M-Sport Fiesta R5+ (or someone from M-Sport) how exactly the costs compared to buying/running the regular R5. That wasn't just a case of running a larger air restrictor, there were some mechanical differences, but they weren't extensive. When I asked someone at Goodwood a few years ago who was running one, I was told there wasn't too big a difference in the costs involved between that and the R5. As a spectator though I wasn't really in a position to ask for a breakdown of the costs! I've haven't got the impression that the R5+ Fiesta has been particularly unreliable, though nobody has been trying to get 400bhp out of one...