In my experience, ROAR has always let us trickle away from the "set in stone archaic rules" for our larger events. Granted the largest event we've ever held was Electric Regionals... But still. Everytime we ask ROAR for a waiver for one of our large events, they have granted it.
I'm not sure if they would do that with Lipo since they allegedly aren't covered under their insurance for Lipo batteries (And that's their current reasoning for not making rules for it)
I hope they expand. If not, as my track's race director, I am contemplating asking our members who want to run Lipo to join AMA (because AMA covers flying and racing) so that they will be covered under insurance if we choose to allow it next year.
I doubt that ROAR will change any battery rules for 2008, given that it is now August and we haven't heard anything yet. But I certainly hope that by 2009, or by the spring of 2008 they have made the leap to lipo.
The current batch of IB NiMH batteries aren't performing very well. At our track, 3 of us have 4200's, for a total of 10 packs. We have experienced failures on 3 packs in a 2 month span in primarily stock and 19T classes. Now that's expensive! 2 failures from Orion, 1 failure from a Trinity pack.
If anybody needs to see what an overcharged NiMH battery can do, search the on-road forum for 2006 ROAROval nationals. Eric has pictures of a battery embedded in a 2x4 from a careless user. Or search this forum a couple pages back and see a shorted out box of batteries that caught fire in the back of somebody's pickup truck.
To stay on topic... I still firmly believe we do not need to lower ourselves to 5 cells. I think we should open it up to lipo, and I'm all for allowing brushless to expand into other classes. (Now I haven't seen a brushless spec motors race on-road, but in off-road they hold no advantage over my brushed motors.
Paul
P.S. I run brushed equipment only.