A smaller pinion can make a slot car less punchy to drive.
I think a lot of this is what exactly is "punch".
Dom Luongo and myself have talked about limiting F1's to 10T pinions, and he confirmed the car, while .05-.1 slower, is much easier to drive.
But in the case of the 206, I was thinking Scott would have to drop the pinion 3 or 4 teeth.
Before I had an array of power supplies, I tried the tiny pinion thing to limit the speed on a rental car.
IMO, it just doesn't do the job.
The car's top speed is certainly reduced, but the car drives weird.
It becomes sort of an on-off switch.
I later bought some rental cars with 25K motors.
They ran the same way.
With the brake wire hooked up, the car just slammed to a stop and it was impossible for a new person to drive smooth.
It's like the first time I drove away with my Fiat X1/9 after having learned to drive stick in my brother's VW Bug.
If there was a little human in the slot car, he would have whiplash.
I even tried running them with 2 wires and then they didn't have enough brakes.
I put in "normal" motors and went to adjustable power and the cars operate normally, accelerating smoothly/steadily.
The other 2 issues are if one can't blip and go, IOW, not being full speed a good portion of the lap, the controller is going to get real hot.
The other is getting the crown gear to live with a motor that powerful.
When we did a lot of Hardbody racing, racers chewed up a fair amount of crowns, just using the 4002FK.
When the pink gears got scarse, and racers had to switch to the black gears, they even chewed up more, with their "this should be good enough", gear adjustment.
I run my CR206 in both a fender car and dragster on my 16.4V drag strip.
I seldom have a problem, but occasionally do.
The dragster's Koford 27T crown probably has 1,500-2,000 passes on it, but I always use a flat, and when I change pinion size , I take whatever amount of time that is needed to get the lash correct.
If it takes 5 minutes, it takes 5 minutes.
The other guys aren't nearly as patient and I sell them new crowns regularly.