MATT JAMES AMES

EDITOR “The punishment doesn’t fit the crime here”

T

he news that Shane Bland will return to the National Hot Rod trail for the 2018 season, which was reported in Motorsport News just before Christmas, is very positive, because he is without doubt one of the star performers in the category.

Bland was fed up with the sport after collecting a two-meeting ban for incorrect tyre logging at a meeting last year. Each driver has to nominate which tyres they will use for a meeting, and has to register those with the series officials. That means they have to write down the code on each tyre – equivalent to the number that you would find on the bottom of a barcode – and lodge them with the scrutineers. If the numbers don’t match up, then the driver is banned for two meetings.

In recent seasons, there have been concerns about driving standards in the category and action has been taken to clamp down on these, with more severe penalties handed out and drivers being banned. That is fair enough, and it is something that everyone on the grid can agree with: after all, nobody wants to sustain huge costs chasing a sport that they love.

But the tyre logging rule is one that has caused much concern because drivers are having their entire campaigns ruined for what is, essentially, a clerical error.

While it is right and proper that there are procedures in place to make sure that racers aren’t cheating or spending huge budgets on tyres that others can’t match, the punishment doesn’t really seem to fit the crime.

If a driver has mixed up his logging numbers, then the results are expunged from the meeting they are caught at and they have to miss the next two to serve their ban. That is three rounds that are forfeited. When you consider that the qualifying campaign for the World Final only runs to 14 rounds, that means any driver found guilty of the offence will then struggle to make it to the sport’s showpiece event in July.

It also robs the fans of seeing the sport’s big names if they are forced to sit out rounds for this offence. When you go to watch National Hot Rods, you want all of the stars to be there to provide a real spectacle. If you go and a handful of top names are missing because they wrote some numbers down in the incorrect order, then it is slightly baffling.

There has to be a better way of dealing with this problem: maybe a points deduction or a one-meeting exclusion would be a more suitable punishment than the current system?

Motor racing is hard enough, without extra rules making it even tougher.