Bob Reese... nice pictures. There should be one more of your "color" stripes though. That's the one that takes into account the low rear tire pressure and the fact that the tire is leaning and the tire track will be even further inside the body than your yellow stripe when the car is turning back towards it's lane.
Again, it's not Force's fault that he just happened to do this between the blocks. I seriously doubt he planned it this way. Had his "swerve" been a few hundred feet sooner or later we wouldn't be having this discussion. He would have booted a red block and lost both round win points and penalty points for crossing the line.
The real issue here is the loose way NHRA's rule is written and enforced. There are effectively four (4) different ways a you can be disqualified for getting out of your lane on a pass. If you touch the wall (1) with anything on your car, your disqualified. If the pass involves the centerline, you're disqualified if your body (2) or header (3) hits a block. But if you don't cross where there's a block, you get about a foot more before your "tucked in tires" (4) cross all the way over the width of the white line. So apparently the header, body and wing can go way over the white line and it's still a legal pass.
Question: IF both cars did exactly what John Force did at the exact same point on the track and at the exact same time and hit each other... who gets the win?
Or are they both disqualified even though they both just made a legal pass? It's probably time to tighten up the way the rule is written.
Again, it's not Force's fault that he just happened to do this between the blocks. I seriously doubt he planned it this way. Had his "swerve" been a few hundred feet sooner or later we wouldn't be having this discussion. He would have booted a red block and lost both round win points and penalty points for crossing the line.
The real issue here is the loose way NHRA's rule is written and enforced. There are effectively four (4) different ways a you can be disqualified for getting out of your lane on a pass. If you touch the wall (1) with anything on your car, your disqualified. If the pass involves the centerline, you're disqualified if your body (2) or header (3) hits a block. But if you don't cross where there's a block, you get about a foot more before your "tucked in tires" (4) cross all the way over the width of the white line. So apparently the header, body and wing can go way over the white line and it's still a legal pass.
Question: IF both cars did exactly what John Force did at the exact same point on the track and at the exact same time and hit each other... who gets the win?
Or are they both disqualified even though they both just made a legal pass? It's probably time to tighten up the way the rule is written.
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