USCC (leave your axe outside)

[Dodge_Swinger]

Originally Posted by Matt

Ahhh, calling it NASCRAP again, I see the arguments have fallen back into the petulant child category.

Thou shalt not blaspheme the holy NASCAR, for it is unseemly before THE LORD FRANCE. Nor shalt thou speak in the petulant tone of a child, for even if ye art beset on all sides by Cautions of Full Course and foolish drivers bearing worldly riches, verily I say unto you that the Performance is Balanced, yea even unto GTD! Though ye have been falsely accused of striking thy brother and stripped of thy position, are not the number of Prototypes on the LEAD LAP nine, yea even the P2s that lie with men as if women and are therefore unclean? For I tell you, for any that speak in petulant tones, THE LORD FRANCE will smite thee with sores and you will be cast into the Pit of Worldly Endurance, which haveth no LDWB and alloweth not the fueling whilst changing the Tires! Has not THE LORD FRANCE created a new Covenant where the weak are exalted and the mighty struck down? I tell you this, lest any man cease his criticism of IMSA, he shalt not enter the KINGDOM OF DAYTONA, nay, even CHARLOTTE!

[LouisTheShark]

Originally Posted by Simmi

I figure they can't have used that exterior footage in the initial process. I got the impression they carted that out to prove a point once Job came up to the office.

If they did use that footage (which I Vine'd off the TV and sent to Marshall) then they have people who either can't (or wouldn't) take the time to read a number on the side of the car.

If that footage was part of the broadcast, then they had access to it. It is my understanding they have access to all footage of every TV camera around the race track with the exception that during this event some in car cameras shared channels, which they are using as an excuse for this one. Even if for some reason they did not have access to the R&T footage, then why make a call solely based on in car camera footage? In car camera footage is just too one sided to provide a full perspective.

Consider now that the footage shown in the R&T piece even brings into question if the Porsche was really at fault. How do we know for certain that the Ferrari didn't just turn in? Or could this be just one of those situation where both are at fault as both are supposed to give each other some racing room? Sometimes no call is better then trying to force a call. And that is what I hear some competitors complain about. They feel this crew is trying too hard to find fault when sometimes it's better to let people race.

[Dodge_Swinger]

Originally Posted by jasonjessica09

We are not nascrap fans. We don't care how many cars are on the lead lap. We just want good solid endurance racing that is not botched by full course yellows and bad officiating. In fact I for one miss the days of cars winning the Daytona 24 by 10 to 20 laps.

This

[FstrthnU]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8cTdQxMZ0&app=desktop

Shakedown delivers again

[Dodge_Swinger]

Originally Posted by FstrthnU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8cTdQxMZ0&app=desktop

Shakedown delivers again

Exactly.

[Dodge_Swinger]

If there were no FCYs (only local yellows) thrown at Sebring, i.e. 12 uninterrupted hours of green flag racing, and assuming BoP is perfect, Gannassi/ESM/WTR/insert team here won the race by 4 laps with few, if any cars on the same lap (2nd place 4 laps down, 3rd place 6 laps down, etc.) would you consider it a great race? (The reasons for such a situation would be mechanical issues resulting in lengthy time in the pits or garage, clumsy pit stops, and good old great driving, great set up and pit work.)

I would. Of course it would be even better if the margin of victory was .5 seconds after 12 or 24 hours of GREEN flag racing, but I would be more than satisfied with the above outcome.

I don't think everyone agrees with that hypothetical scenario, least of all IMSA.

[jasonjessica09]

Originally Posted by jasonjessica09

We are not nascrap fans. We don't care how many cars are on the lead lap. We just want good solid endurance racing that is not botched by full course yellows and bad officiating. In fact I for one miss the days of cars winning the Daytona 24 by 10 to 20 laps.

Yes I said "nascrap". I aint the first to say it. Still I hope you will pay more attention to the third and fourth sentences of the previous statement. Regardless, thanks to Marshall Preutt and Leo Parente and the comments on each of their postings. IMSA should know pretty well what is up by now and will fix the issues.

I for one am calling for LMPC to be moved to more races where they run with IMSA lites or GTD only and to not share the track with GTLM in particular. I'd rather see them go away completely but I don't see that happening until 2017.

[Speed-King]

Yes I said "nascrap"

I still don't think that NASCAR is the main culprit. Some of the people that are most critical of the new regime are actually from the ex-GA side of things. These guys have been more or less fine with the way things were being run by Raffauf et al (otherwise they'd have left a long time ago), but they are appalled by how the new guys chose to handle things.

[MoMedic9019]

Originally Posted by Louie Loper

He talks as if he can't improve on his own rule book.

This line....

SA: Well, it's another very complicated situation. And you know why – what takes time, obviously, is not removing the stalled car, that happened relatively quickly and it was done. What takes time is closing the pits, opening the pits and then proceeding with the wave-by procedures that are dictated is how full-course yellows are to be handled.

Then this...

We have agonized over this process because there is no provision anywhere, not just within the infrastructure but anywhere in motorsport that I'm familiar with. And I've asked, I've tasked our race officials to come back with is there any mechanism that's recognized, even outside of our own auspices, to correct a mistake like this. And the answer is – it sounds very abrupt and clipped – but there really isn't.

My apologies but here goes a rant...and a big one...

In my line of work, when we find a procedure, protocol, or system that has errors, complications, or is just far too complex in terms of using it. We change it. We fix it. We improve it. No questions asked. Why? Because my safety, or a patients safety, or legal safety needs to be maintained at all times. Full stop.

There is ZERO reason why a full FCY procedure had to be undertaken that close to the checker. None. There is no acceptable excuse, no PR crap that will ever make me believe it was the only way. There is always another way....

Before the season we heard about this "quick yellow" procedure that was supposed to happen. That obviously got written out. And Code 60 makes no sense to them for some dumb reason.

In a situation like this, it can be resolved very quickly.

Car off or stalled--

Corner call to race control--
Race control looks at situation--
Determination made car needs recovery--
Code 60 full circuit--Pits closed--IMSA Rapid Response car deployed for course clearance
Car recovered to closest cutout or moved to low impact area--
Course clearance complete, Green Flag one lap after--
Pits Open--

All of that should take no more than three to five laps. At any point it would be easy to say, oh, tons of fluid down, need to upgrade to a FCY. How hard is that??

As for the botched penalty, all of the cars have some level of GPS, they have cameras, they have live video, they have everything they need. I'm not going to bugger on about this much more.

Prior to calling the penalty, everything should have been reviewed. There were only three white Porsche's in the field. A 1 in 3 shot. It should not have been hard to take an extra two laps and make sure...

Anyhow..

Fixing it would have been simple as well. You give them the lap back, and re-position the car where they were in the running order when the miscalled penalty occurred.

Procedure--

Avoidable contact incident
Penalty review
Penalty called correct--Serve penalty
Penalty called incorrect with penalty served--position car back to original running order--may require Code 60--
Penalty not served--no action--


There...IMSA...feel free to use the above to fix your issues.

[Bob Riebe]

Originally Posted by Speed-King

I still don't think that NASCAR is the main culprit. Some of the people that are most critical of the new regime are actually from the ex-GA side of things. These guys have been more or less fine with the way things were being run by Raffauf et al (otherwise they'd have left a long time ago), but they are appalled by how the new guys chose to handle things.

It is not Nascrap, if is France crap.
Brian France is the first and last word on anything that goes down.
While Atherton is the chief brown-noser but France runs the show.

Big Bill his grandfather, knew cars and car people, the boy knows nothing of either.

[LouisTheShark]

Originally Posted by Bob Riebe

It is not Nascrap, if is France crap.
Brian France is the first and last word on anything that goes down.
While Atherton is the chief brown-noser but France runs the show.

Big Bill his grandfather, knew cars and car people, the boy knows nothing of either.

Except for the fact that Brian France is the CEO of NASCAR he is NOT involved in any of the IMSA operations. When, and I mean WHEN, a France family decision on changes at IMSA are being made, it will be Jim France. This is Atherton's second stint at ISC/NASCAR, the first one lasted less then a year if I recall.

[Louie Loper]

Originally Posted by Dodge_Swinger

If there were no FCYs (only local yellows) thrown at Sebring, i.e. 12 uninterrupted hours of green flag racing, and assuming BoP is perfect, Gannassi/ESM/WTR/insert team here won the race by 4 laps with few, if any cars on the same lap (2nd place 4 laps down, 3rd place 6 laps down, etc.) would you consider it a great race? (The reasons for such a situation would be mechanical issues resulting in lengthy time in the pits or garage, clumsy pit stops, and good old great driving, great set up and pit work.)

I would. Of course it would be even better if the margin of victory was .5 seconds after 12 or 24 hours of GREEN flag racing, but I would be more than satisfied with the above outcome.

I don't think everyone agrees with that hypothetical scenario, least of all IMSA.

I have no problem with a car winning by 4 laps if they deserve it. It's natural, let it happen. Races being won by that much make the close ones so great.

Like a few years ago at Le Mans when Audi beat Peugeot by what was it 17 seconds?

[Victor_RO]

Originally Posted by Louie Loper

Like a few years ago at Le Mans when Audi beat Peugeot by what was it 17 seconds?

13.854 seconds.

[MoMedic9019]

Originally Posted by Louie Loper

I have no problem with a car winning by 4 laps if they deserve it. It's natural, let it happen. Races being won by that much make the close ones so great.

Like a few years ago at Le Mans when Audi beat Peugeot by what was it 17 seconds?

Fully agree, it forces them to push right to the end, can't slouch...

But even those won by multiple laps are great ones...why? One mistake and it can all be lost. It's something I've had first hand experience with.

2004 P675 lead at Sebring with 12 laps on the 2nd place car, 9 more to 3rd, 6 hours in...all went sideways with an errant debris strike, then a oil cooler failure...

When the ends of races are messed with by an artificial source, it ruins it. Dalziel was 1-2sec faster and simply ran out of time to catch Franchitti...another 5-10 laps he would have had him, and a P2 win.

[chernaudi]

And for those people who want to rip on Atherton and Bennett, they're responsible for administering the series and we'd like to believe that they're in a position of power to do something about this, but both of them are in the pay of Jim France and Don Panoz.

IE, Scott said what Jim and Don paid him to say. He and Bennet and a lot of the guys, I do sort of get the impression--and it's not a good one--that these guys are willing to be figure heads for pay and leave a lot of the serious last say on decisions to France and/or Panoz.

One, that's counter-productive. Yeah, it's be simple if only one or two people had the last say in a benevolent dictatorship. But Jim and Don have been largely invisible in the public eye except for certain occasions, and I don't believe that either man has the desire to get into the nitty-gritty of the sport on a constant basis. They're the owners, I'm not sure they want to be the mechanics.

Second, this does show, if true, that the series management has major problems with delegating authority and making sure that the right people are in place with the right systems to make things work the best that they can.

I basically believe that the right people are there for the most part, but not in the right places. Atherton and Bennett are PR people, and France and Panoz are the money men/series leaders. Those are perhaps the only 4 positions that are fully right. They need to get Scot Elkins out of race control (where's he's a glorified butt-coverer IMO) and let him focus on being technical director. They need to get Paul Walter to shape up or ship out an if the latter, find someone who can do the job.

There seem to be plenty of qualified personnel from the ALMS and GA, as well as the old IMSA GTP series, just sitting on the sidelines per Louis the Shark, and per Louis, it seems as if the big four (France, Panoz, Atherton and Bennett) are trying to insulate them from criticism and the crap storm that's happening now. And these guys are being held in reserve as a plan B if things really hit the fan. Two of the most well known are Mark Raffauf and George Silbermann. Both have strong ties to the old IMSA series, both still have strong ties to Jim France and are in good standing with Don Panoz it seems. And both are on the AMA board and both are, like others it seems, are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Either way, I'd expect a major shake up after Long Beach or Laguna Seca if something else cringe-worthy happens soon.

But I do agree with the assessments on Atherton's speech. Either his hands are tied, or he's getting paid pretty well by Jim and Don to say what he says and be their PR puppet.

[chernaudi]

And I'm not saying that the WEC's race control is perfect, but I think that most of us will agree that it's a lot better than TUSCC's

From an interview with WEC/LM24 race director Eduardo Freitas:

On info available to race control: "It changes from circuit to circuit. In Europe we have two sources of information on the video side which is the TV feed and the Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) cameras around the venue, which are a good source of help and we have a lot of footage from CCTV cameras which TV viewers don’t see at home. Sometimes on TV it looks one way and on CCTV the story can be totally different, and it can be misleading to the TV viewer.

We can re-trace on CCTV as many as 10 previous laps of a particular car before an incident to see what sort of line he has been taking through a corner, and what changes he might have made when something happened, either contact or an accident. It’s a useful tool but unfortunately at circuits such as Sao Paulo we don’t have this available; there it’s all based on TV broadcast.

We have access also to other data, including that of the car. We don’t run a set up as sophisticated as F1 where they have live data of the car on each lap, but here we have it at intervals of one hour when the car stops in the pits and downloads its data. Sometimes decisions have to be taken with urgency to get back to the sporting value of the race. We have quite good information from the timing, although we don’t run GPS systems and use just three timing points around the track, and that’s also important for analysing the behaviour of a car on track, deltas of speed and so on. We are working on a progressive way to increase this information but it’s a very expensive business and has to be done step by step!"

Big difference, huh. Also sounds like a more elaborate version of what Beaux Barfield said he had available to him when he was ALMS race director during a Porsche GT3 race on Speed a few years ago. Major difference in thinking between WEC and TUSCC race control and between Freitas, Barfield and Walter as well.

[Fogelhund]

Originally Posted by chernaudi

And for those people who want to rip on Atherton and Bennett, they're responsible for administering the series and we'd like to believe that they're in a position of power to do something about this, but both of them are in the pay of Jim France and Don Panoz.

IE, Scott said what Jim and Don paid him to say. He and Bennet and a lot of the guys, I do sort of get the impression--and it's not a good one--that these guys are willing to be figure heads for pay and leave a lot of the serious last say on decisions to France and/or Panoz.

One, that's counter-productive. Yeah, it's be simple if only one or two people had the last say in a benevolent dictatorship. But Jim and Don have been largely invisible in the public eye except for certain occasions, and I don't believe that either man has the desire to get into the nitty-gritty of the sport on a constant basis. They're the owners, I'm not sure they want to be the mechanics.

Second, this does show, if true, that the series management has major problems with delegating authority and making sure that the right people are in place with the right systems to make things work the best that they can.

I basically believe that the right people are there for the most part, but not in the right places. Atherton and Bennett are PR people, and France and Panoz are the money men/series leaders. Those are perhaps the only 4 positions that are fully right. They need to get Scot Elkins out of race control (where's he's a glorified butt-coverer IMO) and let him focus on being technical director. They need to get Paul Walter to shape up or ship out an if the latter, find someone who can do the job.

There seem to be plenty of qualified personnel from the ALMS and GA, as well as the old IMSA GTP series, just sitting on the sidelines per Louis the Shark, and per Louis, it seems as if the big four (France, Panoz, Atherton and Bennett) are trying to insulate them from criticism and the crap storm that's happening now. And these guys are being held in reserve as a plan B if things really hit the fan. Two of the most well known are Mark Raffauf and George Silbermann. Both have strong ties to the old IMSA series, both still have strong ties to Jim France and are in good standing with Don Panoz it seems. And both are on the AMA board and both are, like others it seems, are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Either way, I'd expect a major shake up after Long Beach or Laguna Seca if something else cringe-worthy happens soon.

But I do agree with the assessments on Atherton's speech. Either his hands are tied, or he's getting paid pretty well by Jim and Don to say what he says and be their PR puppet.

Why do you keep saying Don Panoz?

[chernaudi]

He owned the ALMS, right? And he was the one who tried to initiate a merger, and he's still a spokesperson for the series and on the series board. The former point (spokesperson) is something that he is not matter how much or how little ownership or even day to day interest he has in the series.

My point is that Scott and Ed are someone's puppets right now. They should be in a position of authority if their superiors France or Panoz don't want to exercise theirs. Either they're incompetent, or they're growing fat and happy off being puppets and getting someone's coin in the process.

[Bob Riebe]

Originally Posted by LouisTheShark

Except for the fact that Brian France is the CEO of NASCAR he is NOT involved in any of the IMSA operations. When, and I mean WHEN, a France family decision on changes at IMSA are being made, it will be Jim France. This is Atherton's second stint at ISC/NASCAR, the first one lasted less then a year if I recall.

The France family owned and started Grand Am, they own the biggest tracks they run at, HIS money controls everything period.
The title of CEO is the same as chief butt-kisser.
His uncle Jim is now an advisor passing active control to Brian
Nothing happens without his approval.
If he says crap they drop their pants and squat.

[Fogelhund]

Originally Posted by chernaudi

He owned the ALMS, right? And he was the one who tried to initiate a merger, and he's still a spokesperson for the series and on the series board. The former point (spokesperson) is something that he is not matter how much or how little ownership or even day to day interest he has in the series.

My point is that Scott and Ed are someone's puppets right now. They should be in a position of authority if their superiors France or Panoz don't want to exercise theirs. Either they're incompetent, or they're growing fat and happy off being puppets and getting someone's coin in the process.

Yes, Panoz owned the ALMS... past tense.

He SOLD the ALMS, tracks, assets to Grand Am NASCAR, no merger, it was a buyout.

Spokesperson, there is no such title.

Yes, he is on the board, but of little influence.

Panoz is not in the picture, but then he really wasn't in the end with the ALMS either.

[chernaudi]

How about this: Jim France is now majority owner of the series, right? Where is he in all of this? He's been awfully quiet for someone who's recent "purchase" hasn't been performing up to snuff.

Unless, as some suggested, Jim is his nephew Brian's puppet. If so, then the series' issues are 100% understandable as far as cause and effect...

[Speed-King]

Jim France was never anywhere close to the limelight in GA either. The public face was always someone else. First Edmondson and later Bledsoe and Bennett.

[wdave0]

Originally Posted by Speed-King

Jim France was never anywhere close to the limelight in GA either. The public face was always someone else. First Edmondson and later Bledsoe and Bennett.

Odd too when you think how hard GA was trying to attract NASCAR fans, the France name would have resonated with them. But then, that's the same kind of decision as "Were getting a lot of empty seats so instead of improving the product lets tear down the empties". Now we have a series that's relatively hard to watch so instead of making a compelling product we get a "race" filled with 30 minute commercial breaks, and dead time when you have gone to the trouble and expense of going. Where's the revenue going to come from?

[MoMedic9019]

Ryan Eversley was taking it to the fans on twitter this morning...good to know that poking fun at fans is part of his job as an MRN commentator..same with Jordan Taylor..

Professionals? No....spoiled kids.

[Speed-King]

Professionals? No....spoiled kids.

FWIW: Eversley started out as a mechanic and worked his way into the driver's seat with very little in the way of budget...