Proposed Rule changes 1/26/09

[abordick]

I agree with Abby. When I was chairman, my girls had harnesses that fit well and prevented them from moving around. The only possible thing that a mouthguard could do is help in case the bottom of the buggy his the girl's chin. The front to back movement in that buggy should not be a consideration for mandating mouthguards.

That being said, if your buggy is designed such that your driver has her chin on the bottom, you need padding there anyway.

At first I thought the mouthguard was a good idea, but Abby has turned me around. The only reason mouthguards would help is if other safety mechanisms were deficient.

Lastly, I would also let the current drivers have a say in this, as it's their butts (or teeth) on the line.

ab

[shafeeq]

Did I miss something in this round of changes that removes the requirement for flaggers to actually stop cars from blithely driving into the chute in the middle of freerolls? Almost got to see a Fringe buggy vs Ford sedan rematch this morning. But hey, at least the driver was wearing a mouthguard...

[galexkeene]

Not sure which direction they were coming from, as I wasn't there, but car's into the chute should either be the job of the people barricading the bridge: Spirit the past few years, not sure who it is this year, or if they were coming out the other side near Scaife, then I think it is PhiKap that guards that entrance, but again, not sure. The flaggers are far enough up the road, they can't really guard against cars getting onto the course. Try to stop them once they are on, sure, but stop them, not so much. That's what the people on the barricades, and really the barricades themselves are for.

[shafeeq]

Oops, at least in my time, the people at the barricades were also called flaggers, which in retrospect is weird since they had no flags.

[galexkeene]

Ah.. Fair enough. They were called that in the rules too, at least up until last year. Not sure if their recent changes fixed that odd and confusing terminology.

[FSMike]

On mouthguards: the concussion thing is pretty damn serious, and they do a surprising job of helping with those. And the accidents where the driver is hitting something nose first are probably not the ones to worry about- it’s going to be the ones where the buggy flips or even inverts over a second buggy ("Watch Sambuca- you'll believe a buggy can fly!"). How many driver restraint systems anchor the driver to the floor of the buggy? I just got knocked silly a few weeks ago on the soccer field, and my head never hit anything. It's usually the slamming of the mouth shut (hopefully with tongue out of the way).

As for the others- the spin test makes no sense, the bales make sense, the flags are only partially useful (When chair, I had a nice grad student peel out around me and the barricades at the bottom of Hill 1 [with buggies in the street] because she felt her parking on Hill 1 at that moment was a bigger issue than anything else- shit happens sometimes- and sometimes people decide to go no matter what a flagger says).

[Kurtains Warner]

Just to clear some things up about the use of mouthguards. The design of a mouthguard is not so much to protect your teeth when something is going to hit you in the face. If something is, you have bigger problems, ie broken nose/other facial injuries. The real design of a mouthguard is to protect your upper set of teeth from your lower. During most crashes/impacts, the jaw is moving up and down. This is what causes your damaged teeth, and the sudden stop that your head makes on your jaw is what causes the consussions. Mouthguards slow down this impact. Padding on the bottom of the buggy isn't going to be able to replace a mouthguard, its just there to protect the drivers chin.

A mountguard is very importants if you think about what happens to the buggy/driver when it goes over a crack/bump in the road. Those quick little vertical movements are what cause most chips in teeth because the drivers are not paying attention to there teeth hitting each other while cruising down the course at 30+ mph, Or I hope not.(Didn't mean to sound cruel).


If your worried about it falling out, everyone has some extra duct tape lying around. Just one little piece over the mouth solves that problem.

[Carl Nott]

If your worried about it falling out, everyone has some extra duct tape lying around. Just one little piece over the mouth solves that problem.

[shafeeq]

Somehow, duct tape has the opposite effect in my life ...

[Melissa.Lee]

Being that this rule was made thanks to me and my crash, I can tell you that my mouthguard really saved me/my life.

Winners train, losers complain