milchy

At least 15% of Sunday's Bathurst race was behind the safety car. On almost all of these occasions the safety car was out due to one car being stranded somewhere on the 6km circuit. That means for about 5.9km the conditions are perfectly safe to race.

Why not allow the cars to race over those 5.9km, with the requirement that between two yellow flags (situated either side of the danger) they must travel single file at a set speed limit?

It ought not to be too hard to organise and police and we would get more racing.

What do people think?

queentippy_xr8

OK, that's fair enough looking at it from that point of view, but what would happen if there was problems with brakes etc at the point whered you'd have to slow down, I don't mean to sound like a 'little miss what if', but thered be so many slow down speed up skits, like more than usual in that case, so why not leave it the way it is by just slowing down for a long while behind the safety car, then going for it once it's gone...
Your theory is pretty good, but there's a safety fault in it..
You saw what happened to murph (not that i like holden, i just don't like his penalty- it was ridiculous) with his 5 minute penalty and it wasnt really even his fault that he took off with the fuel still going in the car....

milchy

I take your point but it's just so boring watching the pace car go round and round. It creates distortions and anomalies too. Car 2 which finished 3rd only got back into the race because of the pace car which slowed the whole field down while it was being dragged out of the sand.

By the same token, as much as I hate Holdens, car 1 and car 16 would have won by much more without the safety car there to allow the rest of the field to originally catch up.

Or what about one of the cars which stopped every time the pace car came out and was still in touch with the lead group towards the end.

It's just not endurance racing.

D_XR8

Its true that it is no longer endurance racing, as alkmost all drivers and team owners said that as long as you are on the lead lap after the final pit stop it is then that the real race starts. Also tho there is no other way to "safely" slow the field. We do need the pace car unfortunatly!

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bhr

I think it is a great idea, you could make them use the pit limiter between the yellow flags.

As it is saftey cars are a bit of a detriment to the racing - most teams now wait for some poor bastard to have an accident before deciding to pit, with that method the gain would be much smaller.

But on the other hand I don't think it will happen simply because:
a) People hate changing major rules
b) The saftey car is sponsored and the sponsors would really hate it to go
c) Channel 10 will winge about not being able to put 500 commercials when the saftey car is out (not that it seemed to matter during the coverage of bathurst :dead: )

JR

That's okay, as we spend most of the saftey car periods getting bombarded with 75 commercials anyway.

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