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most engines tended to both be rated in multiples of 50hp
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An Engines rated power is a percentage range over a manufacturer's guaranteed mean. That means it has considerable variation even on the same assembly line.
Aircraft engines are built to very tight safety margins like all aircraft components. It is not like a ground vehicle where you can overbuild using large safety margins.
Stress aircraft components beyond what the engineers allow for in the Operating Instructions and they will break. It is the engineers that set those instructions based on the work an airplane is designed to perform. Fighters are built for top performance in order to destroy enemy fighters for example. There is no wiggle room in that.
If you do your research, you will find that all of the "boost increases" are accompanied by technological advances that maintain the same minimal safety margin.
To hold an aircraft specifically designed for a world record attempt as anything representative of any type of service or engine designed for normal operations is ludicrous. It is apples and oranges from which you cannot draw a single conclusion about what goes in front of the firewall on a practical aircraft. It is like drawing conclusions about capability of the car in your driveway engine by examining a top fuel dragster.
Those airplanes are specifically designed to achieve one goal and nothing else. They don't care if the engine last's 15 minutes if it only takes 5 minutes to set the record.
Many of these record breakers were completely impractical designs for anything other than that attempt. The Me-209 for example was a stability and control nightmare and was impractical for anything more than a few minutes flight of rather risky flight. That is typical of these "record breakers".