Rich Urschel wrote:
> I think we should give you fair warning that people who invest an enormous
> amount of time, money, and effort into getting their name in the rulebook
as
> a National Champion don't always stop to reason before plunking down hard
> cash to protest someone who beat them. SCCA tries to discourage unfounded
> protests by retaining protest fees but that seems to be far more common in
> road racing than autocrossing, and is not used to punish protests of rules
> violations where no competitive advantage has been gained.
Maybe it's just me, but I think this is a grossly unfair statement. I know a
lot of people who have been on both sides of the protest system, and I can
honestly say that every single protest that I know of has had plenty of
stopping and reasoning before putting up the protest fee. In every case that
I know of, the protestor either A) thought that the protestee was gaining an
unfair advantage by doing something, or B) felt that a rule needed to be
clarified more than the write-a-letter process had accomplished.
In the latter case, getting the protest before the SEB with its "Appeals
Committee" hat on gets the issue a lot of attention, more so than a
letter-writing campaign.
Sometimes the protest/appeals committee (and I've served on protest
committees) disagrees with the protestor about what sort of competitive
advantage came from the protested item, but that doesn't mean that the
protestor didn't feel personally that there was such an advantage.
I'm sure I'm about to get barraged with examples of "weenie" protests, but ...
I think that 90+% of the protests are not weenie, and there is far more FUD
about weenie protests than actual instances of them.
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