Let the fun begin ....

>A quote from the STPR website Forum ...
>
>Spectators are ONLY authorized at official spectator
>locations. If you are found at an unauthorized location, you
>will force us to take corrective action. This will likely
>take the form of stopping and cancelling of that stage. Then
>there will be nothing for you to watch, and you will have
>wasted both your time and the time of all the competitors
>and workers.

I have avoided commenting on this issue, but I cannot hold back any longer.

Consider the following: I pay to watch and I am required to be in a specific location, and then a car goes into that zone and I get hurt. The lawyer is going to argue that the organizers were negligent in picking such a bad spot because no incident occurred in one of the other prohibited areas. Isn?t hindsight a wonderful thing?!

I don?t profess to be a legal expert but this seems to raise the cost of liability not lower it. Charging people and then restricting where they can be places a higher burden on the organizers to ensure people's safety. To prevent this from happening, an area is selected that is so far away from the action to make such a scenario highly unlikely?even after the fact. Thus you get what I heard happened at Cherokee last year, too far from the action to bother going.

Isn?t a better method to identify the prohibited zones, and leave remaining areas to the choice of the spectator? Post a bunch of signs mentioning this is a high speed area and watching is at your own risk.

It is my belief that people should be given the power, and information, to determine their destiny instead of it determined by someone else.

Paul Nelson
Navie

Mark B wrote:
>Don't confuse increased liability with decreased safety.
>This is what you are doing in your argument.

No, I am not confusing the two, I never mentioned the spectator zone would decrease safety. I think we are in argeement, see below.

>The basis for insurance premiums has to be directly
>proportional the product of the liability costs of an
>incident, times the liklihood of a payment for an incident,
>times the probablity of an incident. Overall liability may
>double, but if the probability of an incident, goes down by
>a factor of 10, then the risk and premiums are lowered.

Just like I said ealier, to avoid a high liability exposure, a spectator zone or pen will have to be placed far enough away to make such an outcome very remote.

I agree there needs to be spectator control and take reasonable steps to improve safety.

I think orangizers can: (1) improve safety, (2) keep it enjoyable, and (3) manage liabiliy cost. I think the current action fails in item (2) and unless the spectator pen is far away it fails in item (3).

I wonder what the offroad guys in SCORE, etc, do for crowd control?

Paul Nelson

>>It is my belief that people should be given the power, and
>>information, to determine their destiny instead of it
>>determined by someone else.
>
>So if I rob a bank, because I think it is my destiny, then I
>should get to keep the money and stay out of Jail?

Trevor,

If you rob a bank, your destiny is to hopefully get caught and spend time in jail.

Lets be reasonble here ok.

Paul Nelson