"Given that the only people adversely affected would be those who are penalised for bad driving as per the regulations, what would be the problem?"
The problem is one of cost-avoidance.
There are two types of contact, accidental and deliberate.
Accidental contact occurs because the driver makes a mistake or the situation is out of his control.
Deliberate contact occurs when the driver intends to cause damage or expects to make contact.
It is impossible to prove that the driver intended to make contact, unless the driver admits doing so or is seen to make obvious moves towards making contact (eg: waiting to ram someone or deliberately steering into them on the straight).
I suggest that there are very few of the latter sort of incident, and that most incidents are mistakes.
Speaking from experience, although I have had my fair share of accidents / incidents, sometimes causing damage or having damage caused to me, I have never deliberately tried to ram someone off the track.
So what causes the incidents? Often it is a simple mistake. One tries to exploit an opening that with hindsight might not have been there. The driver who swings wide into the corner, leaving a hole but then cuts back to the apex. If you think you can get sufficiently far forward, the other driver has to leave you room. If you don't get sufficiently far forward then karts collide, and it is likely that the overtaken driver will not have seen the overtaking driver, will accuse him of 'deliberately ramming '. Another situation occurs when a driver decides to take a corner a little slower, with a driver right on his tail, expecting the corner to be taken in the same way the leading driver has taken it for the last n laps. Mistake or deliberate punt?
Once you start making the allocation of blame a desirable part of the office procedure, then people will be adamant that blame is allocated, even where the decision is unclear. We have seen that happen with the 'compensation culture' in real life, do we want to start it in karting?
Indeed, in much the same way as there's 'crash for cash', we might see drivers climb up through the grid simply by causing drivers who might otherwise would have passed them to hit them.
And then we could expect a rule that said that any driver ahead of someone who caught them up would have to give way. Indeed, rumour has it that this is already being trialled at some tracks with the intent of getting it passed by 'the MSA'.
If there's one thing we have seen in karting it is that well intentioned ideas have had predictable if unintended consequences. Treating the issue of contact and race damage as something that will respond to 'compensation' falls, I suggest, well into that category.
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Driving Standards by 'SJTKart76' (09 May 2014 @ 12:39)
