How will you now involve 150, round number, concerned motorcycle racers and get the opinion of all those who are involved?
It's absolutely trivial, and in fact other sanctioning bodies have been doing it for decades. For every proposed rule change, they publish it, and open up a comment period. The idea of the comment period is to bring up any concerns the racers have and possibly bring up something the MFWIC's aren't considering. Even the best of MFWIC's make mistakes, as you well know. Sometimes it's wording errors like yours, other times it's just a failure to see unintended consequences - the M category cases rule comes to mind.
The important thing is that you at least involve the people who will be affected. People will accept changes much better if they at least have the opportunity to comment, even if they don't like the change. The way this organization runs, people are constantly getting blindsided. Sometimes it costs us a big pile of money, too, because changes happen that we had no clue were even coming. The whole thing is just ridiculous. It comes across as people who are just
sure that they know best and nobody else could possibly have useful input. That's called arrogance.
The traditional way to do this is in the sanctioning body's newsletter. SCTA could easily post proposed rule changes on their website, and provide an e-mail address for comments to be sent. All e-mails on the subject could be published. All you really have to do is make people feel like they got a say. Nobody reasonable believes they'll always get their way. By locking people out you're basically assuming that everyone is unreasonable except the anointed few. That's total BS. People by and large are reasonable if you treat them with a little respect, which you're not.
If you send out a poll, by any method you will get maybe 30% response. This does not involve your 150 racers by any stretch of the imagination.
So what? The point is that you give people a
chance. Right now you're not even giving us a chance.
How long do you think the process to reach a decision will take? It took us 5 years to formulate the Classic Category on the car side.
That's a cop-out. It's not going to take you 5 years to read everyone's comments.
You're operating on a base assumption that people are too unreasonable to be allowed a say. That's not only false, it's arrogant.
I'm not proposing we write rules by group consensus; that
would take 5 years for every change, if you were lucky. I'm proposing that you give us a heads up
and allow us to comment. This is a very, very common thing in the rest of the racing universe, most of which have many times more members than SCTA.
We tried to include all current and potential people who would be affected plus most of the LSR car builders in So. Cal.
I don't believe you. I know multiple people who are affected and knew nothing of what was going on.
The above is of course assuming that you have volunteered your time to assist the SCTA Board by attending meetings, involving yourself with the running of the meets and any number of things that are required of those that give unselfishly to provide the competitors of the safest possible venues.
Nobody is questioning any of that. What I'm questioning is why SCTA can't do like multiple other organizations and allow the racers to a) be told in advance about upcoming changes, and b) to comment on them.
Had you done that, for example, on the helmet rule, your mistake would've been caught.
Personally I have no problem with this tire rule. What I have a problem with is always being blind sided.
