This wouldn't be the same individual who barbecued a 40VF as a sign of protest?
You are in the right general area, although I have various versions of that story.
It might have been a protest, but one of the stated reasons was because, as "everyone knew", the 40VF would "blow the front seal" in about 20-30 flights. Never mind the fact that "everyone" comprised about 10 people in New Jersey, and the rest of us got thousands of flights out of them. In fact, I ran one of the "blown front seal" motors for roughly 10 years with great success. It's in the backup airplane right now, and if I had to do one flight with no practice to save my life, I would probably choose that airplane and engine because despite the fact that it hasn't been run in 10 years.
The real issue appeared to be erroneous set up, and attempting to run the exhaust through a 18" arrowshaft with an ID of about 1/4". And of course the "cult of personality" demanded that no one ever try anything different from the Royal Proclamations, whether it worked or not.
One of the more frustrating things I saw was at the 93 NATs, and a small group of individuals running 40 and 46VFs couldn't get a reliable run, while Dave and I were getting in about 40 flights a day, like metronomes. The guys would come by, complain that they overran, underran, had flameouts, etc. and we asked them how they had it set up. It was clearly wrong, and we would suggest changes, but no, "so and so told us that if we changed the pipe length they would break my arm" and that sort of thing. Than go back and have the same issues until they got dropped out. This includes people who should certainly have known better, and that failed to qualify because they couldn't get two complete flights.
This was one of my first experiences with the "you can tell people exactly what to do and they will go off and do the opposite" effect. You can say exactly what and why, give direct line by line instructions, and if you follow it to the letter, it will work. But no, a significant fraction of people will go off and do something complete different, and stick with it despite many obvious problems. This was the era of Paul *blowing everybody away* year after year, while a huge fraction of the competitors seemed to *completely ignore* what he was doing, aside from whining about the judging. Some people STILL haven't learned their lesson and still fail to grasp or be willing to admit their ideas were wrong and demonstrated to be wrong.
Brett
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