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January 21, 2005
Finally Pit Road Speeds to be Electronically Timed
From Jayski's: Pit Road Speed to be electronically timed: Nextel Cup Series director John Darby says hardware for the pit road speeding system is being installed at racetracks and NASCAR hopes to have software perfected in time to use it at the Feb. 20 Daytona 500. NASCAR enforces speed limits on pit road to help protect crewmembers from being hit by cars. Teams have complained that the old monitoring system, which involved officials timing cars by hand with stopwatches, led to inconsistent and inaccurate enforcement. Darby says there wasn't anything wrong with the old system but NASCAR is changing at the teams' request. Under the old system, Darby says, officials had discretion to not penalize drivers who might have sped on pit road, for example, to avoid an accident. But with electronic monitoring, Darby says, officials have no choice but to make speeding penalties black and white, regardless of the circumstances.(USA Today)(1-21-2005)
This is way overdue. In this day and age, with the technology that is available to Nascar, they shouldn't be using stopwatches to monitor pit road speeds. That had led to accusations, which were probably valid, that enforcement of pit road speeds was sometimes arbitrary and inaccurate. This way there is no question about who is speeding and who isn't.
What I don't understand is Darby's comment about how now officials will have no choice but to enforce speeding penalities, even if a guy is trying to avoid an accident. Just as when the official was standing there holding a stopwatch and had to decide whether to penalize a driver or not, when the electronic timing device tells an official that a driver is speeding, they can still decide whether there were any extenuating circumstances. Or perhaps Nascar, who was very resistant to making this change, is seeking to punish the teams who asked for this.
Of course if Nascar can't get the software perfected in time or there are any problems installing the hardware, they won't end up using it, at least not for the first part of the season.
Posted by silverdsl at January 21, 2005 11:41 AM