you're mostly missing the point, you go racing to beat the opposition, to do that you exploit the boundaries of 'THE REGULATIONS' of whatever class structure your participating in. peters beetle was in against the best
engineers, let alone drivers, in his chosen discipline, and i mean world class, and he'd reached the end of reliable development of the aircooled motors, and you cant "just bolt in a Porsche or Subaru engine", again, 'REGULATIONS' say, in short, o/e block.. no T4, no scats, no wbx, it was pure T1, the loophole was they forgot to tie down the top end,
so Porsche heads appeared on T1 blocks in '84, wbx appeared in '86, all giving some 400 reliable hp, and there's the key word, reliable, all the 'racing heads' are useless at these figures for racing even today , then there were scat split ports or
highly modified t/p heads, all unreliable in low grip, high revs disciplines, then you needed to bolt on a turbo to stay with the xtracs and Quattros, no brainer.
there you have it really, different agenda. all the drag race stuff is for drag racing, it wont pass muster for 80 mins of circuit racing, the average double header meeting, two qualies and two races, and even the rallycross motors only run for about 30 mins. so, to live , and run at the front in a v.w, something a LOT better than anything available today means clever thinking 'out the box' ,so thanks to guys like Trevor chinn, peters engineer , and Geoff thomas at autocavan , beetles slayed giants. were improving, cnc 044s are a big step, but i'll bust 'em, they don't like 10 plus to 1 c/r big cc and high revs for what i want to do to with them, but there o.k for 10secs, or go slow and win nothing...nahh.