[Tony C]

Originally Posted by PVDA

Was going to post this in the Bathurst thread but it would get lost in the whole penalty thing going on at the moment.

As a person who works on track during Safety Car incidents I believe I am qualified to comment on this subject unlike may keyboard warriors out here in cyber space.

At the AASA sanctioned AMRS Wakefield round yesterday one of the GT-1 cars binned it into the gravel trap at turn 2, a Code 40 (cars simply use the Pit Lane limiter) was called using a count down on the Race Management Channel and by the end of the count down all cars were expected to have slowed to 40 under a full course yellow situation.

The car was quickly extricated from the gravel and sent on his way and once the Safety & Recovery vehicles that responded had safely cleared the circuit restored to Green after a short count down on the Race Management channel.

I'm pretty sure the cars did less than a full lap at 40 km/h, under a normal Safety Car deployment it would've been 2-3 laps.

I was in Race Control coordinating the Emergency response to this by radio with the two vehicles responded and discussed this with my team members who responded to the incident at the end of the days racing and all commented how much safer they felt knowing the cars were doing 40 everywhere and not speeding past like they would under Safety Car.

It also allowed immediate response of the two vehicles as the cars immediately slowed to 40 and were not racing around to catch the Safety Car train so it also improves driver safety with faster responses as we do not need to wait for the field to slow down to get out there.

Everyone needs to forget about the consequences to the results for individual cars, drivers or teams, this MUST be looked at from the perspective of MARSHAL & DRIVER SAFETY only.

There has already been too many near misses with marshals under Safety Car to not bring in either a Code 40 or Code 60 immediately.

Oh, one car was penalised with a Drive Through for not slowing quickly enough to 40 compared with other cars around him yesterday.

Here is a link to the Code 40 period of the GT-1 race at the AMRS round at Wakefield yesterday from the Blendline TV's live stream. https://youtu.be/9_SxuXbzgS8?t=11609

Thanks for the intelligent idea, you should be working at CAMS... oops no you shouldnt, you have too much common sense. Seriously this is a good idea, costs nothing, and makes the clean up quicker.

An alternative for tracks like Bathurst which have the steep climb up through the cutting would be to use the pit limiter going past the crash site and 80kph everywhere else. The teams have the capability to do this. Maybe even stipulate that the cars must be in 1st gear, the officials can monitor that one. Exclusion from the race as the penality for not being in 1st gear.