gear drives actually damage your engine, it defeats the purpose of balancing it, the noise it creates even with the quite ones, happens to cause harmonic vibrations thru your crank and cam, and just wears your engine out 3x as fast, they're fine for racing cause you rebuild your motor every 1000 miles, but for a street driver, its better to be able to build a nice tough engine thats not going to be needing constant heavey duty maintence