Not to give out any great ideas... But one could use a snow mobile style torque convertor (belt drive) in place of the drop down belt drive to the jack shaft on an Original. The torque convertor varies the pulley sizes based on RPM and wheel speed. It would keep the engine right in its power band and never bog down at the end of the run.
The only limit being belt traction of the convertor itself.... But snow mobiles can run 100+hp so finding one that can hold less than 50hp should be easy.
No one has yet to ever run one in our club, but we are not opposed to it. If one could figure it out and tuned right. It would be cool to see. We keep it simple and cheap. We had a great time friday night, check back in this week for pictures and videos. 4 new tractors this season.
And BTW... if you read the fine print. It's not limited to 16hp. It's limited to 16hp OEM rated blocks. It would be silly to try and govern a hp catagory. Most guys are in the 20-30 range. And we limit to 8hp blocks on the small end because the performance parts aren't there. It takes real creativity to get them to run with the 16's. And they do. Our last 2 tractors in the heavy 1200lb pull off was a w/b cub with a K181 and a full custom tractor with a twin cylinder 16hp Briggs. They ended up less than 3 feet apart.