At 09:46 AM 4/23/99 -0400, John Whitling wrote:
>Poorly enforced! Any other sanctioning body would have enforced the intent
of the
>rule. SCCA officials had every right, according to the rules, to enforce the
>rules. The tires were clearly different to everyone. It was an SCCA event
and BFG
>made a concerted effort to circumvent the rules ... not to just a few
"contract"
>drivers (as had been the case in the past, but that's another issue) but to
>everyone that had pre bought BFG tires for that event.
>
>Another thing ... do you really think that BFG would have produced
hundreds of
>thousands of dollars of tires for that event without some "quiet approval"
by at
>least one SCCA official???? I wonder ....
>
>John Whitling
Here you are wrong. SCCA can only enforce the rules as they are written,
not as they are intended. Which is to say, BFG did not "break" or
"circumvent" the rules, but they did point out how poorly they were
written. As I recall, SCCA did send a representative (not an SEB member)
posing as a customer to see if they could buy a set of tires, and they were
offered the set. So your statement about those who "pre-bought" tires
isn't even correct. They knew the rules, and played within them AS
WRITTEN. And SCCA learned a lesson, and rewrote the rule for the following
year.
Do you really think it's a good idea to try to enforce an intent? "No, I
know that's what it says, but here's what we meant"? And we think the
rules have grey areas now!
BTW, this is definitely not the only example of such a situation. There
have been lots and lots of very poorly written rules over the years.
Sometimes they are fixed due to someone writing a letter, but sometimes the
only way they get fixed is if someone takes advantage of them, or goes out
of their way to show how poor the rule really is. There used to be a rule
that anything illegal found during a teardown couldn't be considered in the
protest unless it had been specifically protested. Seems pretty dumb now,
but that's the way it was. It was changed right after a prominent teardown
where there were lots of illegal parts, but (by chance) none were mentioned
in the protest. Charlie Cave got the SP aero rules revised by building a
clearly legal but rather silly Elan (and he almost got tossed for it -
sometimes you get a goofball in power). Some day we're going to have
someone show up at Nationals with nitrous oxide. I think that it's legal
as the rule is written (my rule book is out in the truck, but I don't
remember it being changed; nitrous is not a fuel! But pump gas surely has
nitrogen in it, so I guess we're all illegal...) but I'm pretty sure the
rule was intended to dissallow such a thing.
Paul and Meredith Brown
MR2: "Not the easiest car in the world to work on"
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