Hello, drivers!

This past weekend's race at Fern Bay Gold was, as usual, something of a learning experience for all of us. But I think that underneath the chaos & controversy it was really a better race than it looked on first glance. There's a lot to be pleased with here, so let's start with that:

1. Behavior under blue flag situations was largely very good. I spent several hours today re-watching the replay several times from several cars' perspectives, and I found that nearly all lapped cars were very clear about where they wanted to be passed, and nearly all lapping cars indictated their passing moves well and got through without roughing up the lapped cars. There were exceptions, of course, but bravo to all of you in general.
   
2. We saw some very good and clean battles despite the difficulty of this combo, and even had two top ten nose-to-tail fights for position on the final lap. Team XFR and Pernix Drivers, as well as My3id and LFSLA put on a great show in the closing laps. Several times throughout the race we had big packs of drivers on the same lap running in tight proximity without it ending in tears. This was great to see.
   
3. Three races and three winners is a thing to applaud. It's great that the level of talent in the series is as deep as it is, and it's good to see many teams stepping up their efforts and getting good finishes. I'd like to give special shoutouts to XFR, Pernix Drivers, and LFSLA for bouncing back from the early rounds and having good, consistent races. After a couple of disappointing initial outings, it was especially nice to see Northstar R4R run near the top 10 much of the day and bring home a solid finish.
   
4. Though the tracker had its troubles (and they will be worked out by next round), the SC Alert bind system worked perfectly. It really helped us to get the SCs out in a timely fashion, and I and the other marshals thank you for using them as requested. Starblue has already shown me an improvement to the Alert system that will be in place for next round, which will automatically direct marshals' cameras to a car that has issued an alert.

And then, of course, there are the negatives:

1. As has been discussed in the race report thread, there is a pervasive problem with car-to-car contact under SC conditions. Some of it is inexplicable (#16's contact with #03 on the intial standing start) and some is a bit more complicated (the various accordion-effect incidents throughout the race), but all of it must stop. Benji and I are pondering various methods for dealing with this problem. A couple are on the table already: 1) penalize EVERYONE who hits someone from behind under SC, regardless of the circumstances (in theory this should convince people to give more room), and 2) go back to using pit speed limiters under the SC. In my opinion, neither is ideal. But we may have to take a less than ideal solution to fix this problem if drivers are unable to fix it themselves. As always, we are interested in suggestions if you have them.
   
2. As mentioned above, the tracker did have some issues this time. We learned a few lessons from our experiences and from the error logs during this race, and these will be applied to the new version of the tracker that will be used for Round 4. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that the malfunction caused.
   
3. There seems to be quite a variance in terms of readiness-to-race between some teams. Some practice obsessively for a month, while others do 30 minutes of practice the night before and just arrive and drive on raceday. While we appreciate that everyone in this series has a busy non-LFS-related life to live, drivers should bear in mind that this is a serious league and that endurance racing requires familiarity with the track, the car, and the setup to be used. If you go into a race un-practiced, you're not only dooming yourself to a poor finish, you're dooming your fellow drivers to on-track chaos.
   
4. We admins understand that sometimes events in the race and our decisions regarding those events will make you angry. We understand this anger and expect to deal with impassioned arguments during the week after a race. We are willing to debate and explain our decsions to some degree, but we ARE NOT okay with being insulted and slandered by the drivers that we built this series for. Nor are we okay with drivers insulting one another on the series forum. We respectfully ask that you respect us and your fellow drivers, think before you speak, and generally restrain yourselves so we can have a civil environment here.

In all, I think we have much to look forward to heading into Round 4 at Aston Historic. It's a big, wide open track that should provide a much less frenzied race than this most recent one, though hopefully it'll be just as hard-fought. At the top of the points standings we have a very tight four-way battle for the lead, and further down the list we have 10 teams within a 25-point spread from 6th place TDRT #2 through 15th place S3Racing #1. Really, there are close fights for position all the way through the standings, which means every team has something to fight for at Historic. I implore all teams to put some effort into their driving standards under the SC, as it will provide a better experience for all involved. Why run a few car-lengths closer to the bumper of the car ahead and quadruple the chances of disaster?

Final points standings for round 3 should be posted in the next couple of days, as soon as we finish dealing with a few post-race objections. Good luck practicing for Historic, and we'll see you there.

I would like to thanks all (organizers and racers), that participated in this event. For us, it was race, that gave us a lot of expierence and finally good result.
As we had one primary goal, and that was to provide our drivers the best possible informations about what is happening on the track, when he should slow and let pass other driver, etc. After two bad races for us, I think this really helped us and We finally raced well.
We are looking forward to Aston race and wish all races good luck in practicing.