Howdy,
On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Rick Cone wrote:
> >>As for cost, that should come under the protest bond. <<
>
> I will have to disagree respectfully hear... Every protest costs the
> same. Tear down bonds are essentially the same formula... hours to do
> job X going rate, perhaps dealer rate... but..... but... but...
>
> It should not cost me more to protest a Ferrari in ASP for track or
> wheelbase then it would a Mazda RX7. Why should that burden fall to me
> and not the person that *chooses* to drive a car with expensive (or no)
> documentation.
>
> (And this has been one of the better threads on .net in some time
> btw...)
The burden doesn't fall on you if your protest is upheld.
Here's a question or point I have related to this... How many protests
do we typically see? Out of how many competitors? I bet the ratio is
much less than 1%.
Is it reasonable to require factory documentation when the overwhelming
majority of the time that documentation isn't required? Isn't it smarter
to incur the cost that one time its needs vs. the 1000 times its not?
Perhaps, given the way companies are headed with their documentation, the
time has come for the SCCA to buy a copy (or two! :-) of something like
the Mitchell repair guides or something similar. When you spread the cost
of something like that out over all the competitors, you get a far smaller
impact than you get by requiring each competitor to bring their own copy.
Heck, even in ES (which I'm obviously somewhat familier with), look around
the grid. Just about guaranteed that everyone there with an MR2 has a
$100+ set of Toyota manuals. How many are actually needed? Five at most
(one for each year... And even that's a stretch.) Now, in the $100 range
perhaps the argument that those owners would already have the manual
anyway flies. But when you do that on a grid of Boxsters.... Well the
equation just changed a bit. :-)
I guess I don't have opinions here as much as just wanting to acknowledge
that its probably time to address these issues. Our goal (in terms of a
protest) is to have the data we need to prove the car illegal or not.
Forcing each competitor to have the documentation for their car _isn't_ a
goal. Its a means to the real goal. Perhaps there's a better way.
Mark
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