Why the Porsche 356 isn't a dominate vintage racer in the UK

There seems to be a big difference in performance between the Porsche 356 being vintage raced in the Europe and the ones raced in the USA. Racing across the USA and Canada over the last 20 years, there's always a couple of 356's at the front in my grid. This isn't the case when I travel to Europe. I inquired about this with my mates in the UK, they said "they're not compatitive here". When I asked for details, they said "we do real scrutineering", your American cheater Porsches would never be allowed on the track here. I had to aggree.....

Great racing footage!  But...

When I asked for details, they said "we do real scrutineering", your American cheater Porsches would never be allowed on the track here. I had to aggree.....

There is a story here, and I want to read it!

Don't know what West Coast vintage looks like today, but when I was doing it in the 80s and 90s,  every damned Porsche, especially the 911s were running larger later engines and no one cared.

Bathtubs aren't as easy to cheat with as you can't just plug in a later engine, but I expect that they took liberties as well, and many of the MGAs ran MGB engines, some XK series Jags ran 4.2 engines etc.

Scrutineering was aimed at safety compliance and at the most obvious deviations from the spirit of the thing

Judging by the performance of some of the cars I see online at the various events at Goodwood, many of them wouldn't meet historical standards for their classes either.

In reply to stuart in mn :

I've read a couple of build threads for Goodwood bound cars (Ex. a Nash Metropolitan), and the rules are pretty loose. That car had a 25% displacement increase, plus other MG tricks in it.

DeadSkunk (Warren) said:

In reply to stuart in mn :

I've read a couple of build threads for Goodwood bound cars (Ex. a Nash Metropolitan), and the rules are pretty loose. That car had a 25% displacement increase, plus other MG tricks in it.

I agree, I did use Goodwood as the example though it was mostly for the race video, the real governing organization  Europe is the FIA which is much more thorough then anything we have in the US.

https://historicdb.fia.com/regulations/period-regulations