When Novak spent several years designing, prototyping, testing and investing in the tooling for our first BL motors (4300 and 5800), there was no guarantee that ROAR would ever consider our motors, or any other BL motors, for inclusion in racing. All the R&D and investment was a huge risk for the company.

None of the existing brush companies had shown any interest in developing BL motors, which Novak felt (early in this century) would be an enormous improvement over the existing brush motor designs. I'm still surprised that none of those companies made the investment in BL technology, but they didn't.

It was a huge, expensive risk for Novak-developing and promoting a product line for which we had never been known. We sold the earliest motors for a couple of years before ROAR and the racing community were even willing to consider adopting rules. And there was pressure from the sellers of brush motors who resisted any new rules which would threaten their sales of the existing brush motors.

We offered to OEM our motors to Associated/Reedy Modified, but they worked with LRP to tool up a motor based on Novak's original design. Once the LRP motors were available, ROAR then considered the earliest provisional rules for the new motors. The first rules were shepherded through the ROAR approval process by Mike Reedy(Associated/LRP), who was then President of IFMAR-the international racing sanctioning organization.