Paul Foster <pfoster@gdi.net> wrote:
> This caused the times to be quite erratic and nonlinear. The best example was
> Chuck Sample - then a member of the SEB. His 3 runs varied by 8 seconds
> although he swore that they should have been within a second of each
> other. He protested and lost. But he was right. But he was also wrong
> because there was nothing that could really be done about it...
<<<So what if he had had a datalogger in the car (like the Edelbrock
QwikData, or a
GEEZCube) that could have shown otherwise?>>>
I would have protested his ass for running illegal data acquisition
equipment. ;-)
Seriously, the Reitmeiers used to time everybody in their class with a
stopwatch that had a chance to beat them. When I was running in SFR I
didn't get my year end award once because T&S confused a newbie stock
competitor with an ASP driver at one event. The difference in points was
enough for arch-nemesis Chuck Hanson to take the last year end position.
Errors happen all the time, but I would hope much less so at
Nationals...
<<<There are safety and performance issues to work through, but I'm
pretty sure
they could be solved. These beacons work across great big road race
tracks;
there's more than enough range in them to put the transmitter in a safe
place.
(Just gotta watch out for cross talk)>>>
You should see the S/F line at the typical PCA club race. It looks like
a commercial for tripods. But nobody complains. One thing you have to
watch out for are multiple beacons for the same sort of unit. If there
is more than one you will end up with segment times whether you want
them or not.
<<<But let's say we're in Chuck's shoes. The logger says 50.012, 50.023,
50.045,
50.032, but the timer says 52.000, 54.000, 58.000, 56.000. Is that
enough
evidence to protest the results?>>>
Depends. If it was not at Nationals I think you might have a case to at
least get a rerun or have the officials check the results. But if it
happens at a big event you probably will get overruled because there is
just no way they can throw out the results and have everybody show up
the next day to rerun everything.
But as Byron pointed out they may suspect that you doctored the results.
You'd probably have a better case with incar video...
Paul Foster
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