Originally Posted by
choddo
Maybe they saved a tiny bit of material (and therefore cost) by making the gaps slightly wider on this one.
Nah. The rings are not molten cast, they're stamped and blanked out of sheet. A larger gap would just mean more offal, the waste metal that is recycled. To save weight, that's a possibility. Cheap freewheels used to skip every other tooth on the large cogs, if I recall correctly, this was 1970s I think.