I'll go on the unofficial record
Since I'm not an official.
I saw a driver get out of his car, see flames, then try to alert the Safety Safari. In these high stress events, seconds seem like minutes, and Bob got pretty animated pretty quickly. He pushed the one Safety Safari Official that "sauntered" around the back of his car after wildly pointing to him, and the others that there was something that needed a bit more urgency than they were displaying. What he got in-return was an official who replied with an escalation of physical force, and only when the official had backed him quite a ways from the car, and against the wall, did Bob react throwing the officials hands off of his firesuit.
If NHRA fines Tasca, shame on them. Looking at the whole picture, they'll see Bob acts, not in a disrespectful way, but in an urgent "why are you ignoring my calls for help" way. I was sort of gobsmacked by the disinterest shown to an exiting driver and his attempts to get attention as the Safety Safari crew sort of went through the motions, oblivious to the driver's attempts at alerting them to a fire.
If anything, a little refresher course in situational awareness is needed, at least for
that shutdown crew. Mind you, same guy (I'm pretty sure) that grabbed Tasca and pushed him to the retaining wall is the same one that almost got clipped by Capps in the shutdown because he was waving him to turn after a qual run, again, displaying a lack of attention. Any greenhorn would have seen the 'chutes didn't blossom properly, and he was approaching at a much higher rate of speed than most other cars at that point of the shutdown, yet here's that guy, sort of waving him to turn like he didn't even notice the extra 50mph Capps was carrying at that point. ESPN2 even did a slo-mo replay of this incident.
