Howdy,
On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Rocky Entriken wrote:
> You've just missed it, Mark. :-)
>
> Since 1993, all protest/appeal matters have been included in the back of the
> results booklet we all get.
>
> It might be useful to have them in FasTrack as well, though. Only Nationals
> competitors, and few others, see the results booklet.
Yeah, I'd vote for FasTrack as well. Mostly just because protest results
throughout the year at tours/pros/divisionals could be put there as well.
> BTW, your comment in another post -- "any controversial position would be
> left unspoken" if deliberations were made public sure as hell sounds like an
> attempt to dodge controversy to me -- is quite accurate, but not for the
> reason you infer. The need to dodge controversy -- that is, the
> second-guessing debate after the decision is a done deal -- is so that there
> can be open discussion in the first place.
I didn't mean to infer anything else (though thinking about what I wrote,
that probably wasn't very clear). I _want_ people in those meetings to
feel free to launch up whatever they feel they should, but at the end of
the day, after everything has been talked through, it'd be good to see
more than "xxx is illegal, penalty is DSQ". Most of the time people
aren't blatently cheating, and thus context and interpretation is
important.
For instance, with the FM protest, it would be good to see something like
"recognized F500 expert John Doe explained that adding an exhaust can
could result in powerband modifications that could be beneficial to the
competitor. As such, the illegal exhaust can is considered to
be potentially performance enhancing and the penalty is DSQ."
> But then, people do not want to get into some post-decision harangue with
> people not party to the discussion, who bring to it their own biases and
> (often irrelevant) viewpoints, and then tend to regard those who disagree as
> enemies. If that was the common result of serving on a PC, then the hell
> with it, let someone else do it (and "someone else" suddenly becomes in
> short supply).
I understand the desire to not have to keep defending yourself, etc.
However, I think that you can take it to far the other way and then you
get an appearance of secrecy, etc. When I hear that PC members were
"enjoined against public discussion", that starts to scare me a bit if
there's no other way for competitors to find out the "official" reasoning
behind a decision. The decision alone is NOT enough, particularly when
interpretation issues and ranges of penalties are involved.
> So we don't get that Joe thought the frammis was legal under C&C but Bill
> thought it was illegal as not specifically allowed, and all the debate that
> went on over that point. What we get is that the frammis was deemed illegal.
> We may get that it was adjudged so as not an item specifically allowed. At
> the end of the day, that's all we need to know. The rest is just gossip.
Right. I don't want, nor do I think it would be beneficial, to know each
individual's opinions and the reasoning behind them. What I _would_ like
is the reasoning the group decided on to determine that something was
illegal and what penalty to apply for it.
> That's why juries decide such things, not individual judges. That's why
> there is a Protest *committee* and not just one official deciding. And the
> personal confidentiality is an absolutely essential tool to the job.
One key difference between jury duty and PC duty though is that the PC
members are hand picked (assumption on my part). And, if not abused, this
is a _good_ thing (and I don't think its being abused) as you get
knowledgeable folks there. But the very nature of the non-random-ness of
the PC members means that they have to be that much more careful of
appearing like an old-boy network, etc.
Mark
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