[reid-o]

FWIW over the years--working at a few shops and having seen the market grow for turbocharged parts--a lot of the dangers of header wraps that apply to race situations and teams aren't the cause for failures with street driven cars. I completely agree with your recommendations but for different reasons, as I suspect that most header wraps, even the new composite ones, carry the risk of trapping moisture which compounds the rate of oxidation. Combine that with the fact that most headers are constructed out of the cheaper 304 material than 321 or 316 and you have a huge issue in some geographies. If you consider that the weekend warrior rarely hits wide open throttle, the moisture inside the wrap isn't always allowed to evaporate, but it still absorbs moisture through condensation every morning no matter what the climate is like, unless one lives in subsaharan africa. When I was working for a shop, i noticed that most of the cracked headers were from weekend "warriors" who hardly drove their cars, and while most of those customers chalked the failures to welding defects or the material not withstanding the power they were making, I always felt that there were too many cases to suggest that this was the case.