One bit of clarification here. Ram air was never illegal, but was clarifird last year. Making ram air illegal would have required a change to the long standing rule- air intakes before the AFM were open. At the time, it was thought that trying to regulate/define ram air would cause more pain than codifying it. It would have been a much different situation if the rule had been stock airboxes, and that was changed to allow ram air last year. That would have required a much higher standard of "vetting" per se.

The rule change proposal has been made. We'll see what the feedback is. It is a new rule, not clarifying what has always been, and does need to meet a higher standard. There are several leaps that must be made to make the case for it:

1) The coatings reduce underhood temps to a significant degree at speed.
2) This decreases oil/water temps to a degree significant enough to affect motor logentivity.
3)This increase in logetivity is significant enough to warrent the cost of removal, coating,new gaskets and reinstallation of the header.
4) There is no siginificant performance advantage, or if there is, the improvement in longetivity is enough to make the cost worth it.
5) It is superior to lower cost options - header sleeves/wrap.

Eric is spot on about air intakes. Prior to 2011 air intake were free before the AFM. So you could do what ever you wanted. So that in effect allow ram air intake, but did not explictly say so. Questions on that came up sporadically over the years and then by 2010 nationals the issue came to a head. Legal or not. We made the choice to make it clear where you could obtain air for the engine intake. This was done with the realization the effects would be muted by the limited tuning ablity and could be achived cheaply. I can convert to ram air by redirecting my brake cooling duct to my intake. 30 minutes and zero dollars spent I have a working ram air. That seem perferable to trying to get very specific on where you source the air intake. Ram air need not go through the fog light. Limiting that souce, but allowing others can still allow ram air systems. However they become more compelx and costly that way. Fog light is cheap and easy.

In rule making you always have to make judgement on enforcment vs simple acceptance. Sometimes it make sense to just allow something in it cheapest and simplest form rather than to try to restrict it only to drive people into more costly methods of getting around wording and still getting to a similar effect.

The cleaest method of enforcement would be to require a stock air box. Fine, but that will incur alot more cost for those who don't have one to go and find one. That seems like it is alot worse than $10 of plumbing from home depot.