Could someone perhaps enlighten me about the process of delays being made "official" and who is aware of this information during the trial itself ?
There are often delays during a trial but only sometimes are they deemed official and the only sure way of knowing seems to be after the event has finished. I have on a couple of occasions on previous LE events asked marshalls at sections and time controls if an official delay has been declared and they've not been able to give an official definitive answer. I tend therefore to work on a "rule of thumb" where if I'm travelling late but still seem to be in roughly the correct running order (or even moved forward slightly) then hopefully there's been an official delay somewhere and I should be ok. Is this a reasonable assumption ?
If this information was communicated during the event it may prevent un-necessary high-risk overtaking manouvers described elsewhere on these pages! Use of mobile phones between marshalls and some simple message boards at the beginning of sections would be a quick and easy way of doing this.
Are delays determined by the travelling marshalls who record time arriving at , and completing a section, or something similar ?
By the way I thought it was an excellent Lands End Trial and would like to thank everyone involved. I'm a keen to "keep it as it is" !
Regards,
Keith.
Keith,As I understand the "official delays" are worked out after the event. If you think about it, it would be very difficult to assess an official delay during the event unless you had marshals monitoring the time each car came in and then left again. In certain cases you would need roving marshals taking down everyones number and everyones time as they arrive and depart.To achieve something similar however the use of travelling marshals are employed. They do exactly as you suggest and record the time they arrive at the start (or start of the queue), and the time they leave a section. Then at the end of the event all the travelling marshals time cards are reconciled to see what the "approximate" official delay would have been, at any given time.There is leniency if the time of a competitor is close to that of the official delay and yet just over. In the case of attempting to achieve a Gold there is a 10 minute leeway anyway, 20 minutes for Silver and 30 minutes for Bronze.The penalties for being late relate back to the reliabilty-side of the trials. These days this part of trialling is somewhat overlooked. Most diffs and gearboxes can be changed given enough time (and enough spares), but that isn't the nature of the sport. First should be reliability and then ability to climb. In my mind the timing is therefore at least, if not more, important than climbing all the hills. The timing should be relatively tight to stop an unfair advantage being given to certain cars. By that I mean some car can repair Diffs a lot quicker than others, why should they be given a time allowance to enable them to do this and not others?The time limits need to be in place and fairly tight to make Classic "Reliability" Trials, true to their name. If a car does get held up by reliability problems/punctures etc. then they should NOT try to make up this time by driving at excessive speeds on the road as made clear in the regs. A polite "excuse me" to fellow competitors however will usually see a polite waving by. If not then I guess its a case of accepting the trade-off between competitiveness and reliabilty.
ReplyDeleteThanks Giles for your reply, I was referring to delays caused by long queues rather than reliability problems so pleased to hear that the travelling marshalls time-card covers this. I'll stick to my "rule of thumb" and keep my fingers crossed !!
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