>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.
I talked to Mark Madarash at Nationals last year to drop his protest of Tom
Berry in ESP. Despite accepting the assertion ... by the protest
committee... that the incorrect repair of the car did not create a
performance advantage (they showed to the appeals committee there were
multiple legal ways to get the exact same performance specs)... he insisted
on continuing the protest because he wanted to teach drivers and mechanics a
lesson. He was very proud that he did all work on his car himself and
insisted that everyone else do the same or make sure their mechanic is just
as careful (IMO, anal-retentive) about how they do their work so that no one
could ever call it legal.
So practically speaking, Mark Madarash was insisting that every national
champion driver had to have national champion level mechanics skills too.
Absurd.
> 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.
Maybe, but taking the national championship away from Tom Berry because Mark
Madarash has some sort of mental problem with mechanics was ridiculous. I'm
not sure which was more ridiculous, Mark doing this, a bunch of other ESP
competitors agreeing with it, or the protest committee agreeing with it.
Either way, I have STRONG reservations about competing in ESP for the Solo
II Nationals this year.
SM has in their rules, rules against weenie protests. And with ProSolo, you
have someone sane in charge (Howard Duncan) preventing this kind of
nonsense. Note that Tom Berry did not loose his ESP ProSolo National
Championship with the same car. I was also very happy to see how P.R.O.
handled protests and even made every competitor sign agreements before
competing promising to play nice.
National level SCCA Solo II could be worse I suppose (e.g. SCCA road racing
protests), but it could better as shown by the other examples above.
Sorry if this comes off strong, but I'm still angry about what happened last
year to good people.
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