Originally Posted by Al Fernandez
Well David, like Glenn said, you cant have it both ways. You cannot correct something that has been posted that is not correct without also discrediting the original poster. I've not attacked Matt personally, just tried to correct where he was wrong and asked for clarification when he's contradicted himself.
Similarly, you cannot have more tech inspections without also dedicating more of the racer's weekend to vehicle disassembly and to inspections. You cannot use racers for tech inspection resources without encroaching on their time and potentially antagonizing others under the whole issue of "my competition is being allowed to disect my car". You also cannot ensure adherence to the rules without tech inspections. Balance is key.
No Matt, I do not agree that AI or CMC are professional level racing series. They are ammateur level racing series. The target audience is not Dean Martin, the one guy I know of that has come down from a true pro league to race with us, though it is cool to see that happen. The target audience are the guys we have! Regular guys with regular jobs with a love for cars that want to go out on weekends and race, and drive their hearts out, and hang out with other lunatics like themselves. The fact that some of them can afford to show up with a spare car and a full 18wheeler is not, IMHO, relevant. I understand you want NASA and AI to "step up" to being SCCA's and A-sedan's little brother. I dont, and I have not been informed by NASA that they do either. As for your call for me to be replaced...you're entitled to your opinion. Get the support of our fellow racers and contact Lindsey or Kunzman at HQ. I'm sure they'll tell you car count is king and will happily give me the boot once you prove to them what a miserable job I do.
As for tech...I do agree sometimes we're a little more lax than we should be, though certainly we've done more in 2009 than in previous years. We scale cars just about every race, and inspect one maybe two items half of the races. Some weekends Glenn and I walk around and inspect one thing on every car in the paddock.
What I would like to do in 2010 is as follows:
1) We create a list of several tech items including how to perform the inspection.
2) We hand that to NASA TX tech and tell them to pick at random which of those items to look for. This eliminates "us" as racers from knowing ahead of time which specific item is going to be checked.
3) NASA TX tech performs the inspection and calls us over if something looks suspect to them, and we make a decision accordingly.
4) We log what has been done and to whom and alter the list for the following weekend so that over time everything we want to have looked at is looked at and things that we want repeated are repeated.
This requires more from NASA TX than we've had in the past. Recently it was just Jonathan, and a lot of times he doesnt have the hardware we need. To put it into perspective, at nationals we'd check three or four items and we had something like four tech inspectors. Shannon has told me of her intent to staff up tech to help enable exactly what I've stated. If that happens it means not having to ask our racers to perform tech. We'll see, it'll be a work in progress.