Had a brief conversation this morning and was told that NONE of the equipment he used was damaged or broken. They thought there was an issue with a couple batteries but it turned out it was a temperature thing. Apparently it got a bit cooler in poland, and the lipoly packs like to be 100 or so degrees. The cool packs would be a bit weak on power the first minute or so till they warmed up. All of the packs he took are still in use without any failures. Also the motor change was precautionary, no specific reason except that the motors in the planes had been used quite a bit in testing beforehand, and they had spare new setups with them. In my C50's I have noticed that the gearboxes get a bit more noisy after a couple hundred flights and need to be greased. Removing the gearbox isn't a simple thing to do at the field, so if I had a spare motors I'd probably do that also in a contest at that level.
As for an outrunner,.. I've seen some pretty good numbers published, and I've ran some of them. they work very well. I haven't, however, seen one that will work at the 2.3 kilowatt level (I know there's one that's being advertised to run at that level, but I haven't any personal experience with it). The actro's and lrk's seem to work very well, but never to the specs I've read, always below the geared inside runners. Also a weight penalty since a big direct drive outside runner that can be run at the same power level is almost always a lot heavier. One large direct drive motor I know of works really well,.. almost equivalent to the C50 hacker, but at 3 lbs instead of 1 lb