The Environmental Protection Agency was the focus of the tuning community’s anger recently when a clause in a proposed bill looked like it would affect grassroots racing. Now, the agency is announcing that it has removed the relevant paragraph from the bill.
The document in question is a rules package looking to regulate medium and heavy duty truck emissions. Buried in the document was the following:
“Certified motor vehicles and motor vehicle engines and their emission control devices must remain in their certified configuration even if they are used solely for competition or if they become non-road vehicles or engines.”
The Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) pointed out to its supporters that the language would ban racing parts and race car conversions that do not meet emissions standards, which the association argues they have never been expected to meet. The EPA, however, argued that emissions standards have always applied to race cars and that this was merely clarifying that.
After raising the issue with its supporters, SEMA asked them to sign a petition, which over 168,000 people did. The automotive press and wider automotive community caught on as well, and it now looks like the EPA is backing down.
The EPA wrote late last week that its “focus is not on vehicles built or used exclusively for racing, but on companies that don’t play by the rules and that make and sell products that disable pollution controls on motor vehicles used on public roads.”
So for now, the rules for race cars stay the same, but road cars still have to meet emissions standards—looking at you cat deleters. SEMA, however, still urges its supporters to write to their representatives to support the Recognizing the Protection of Motorsports Act of 2016 (RPM Act) to explicitly protect race car conversions.
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