Azikara

You know the feeling, you've probably had it once, way back when, on the high school football team: someone does you wrong, the referee is not looking, there are no cameras, no action replays, the parents are all looking at the quarterback and the perpetrator gets away scott-free. You can choose to retaliate or suck it up and move on. There's no recourse to this action. Only you and he know what happened. This happens a lot in life and in our racing groups every weekend. But...something has changed, we now have new tools, technologies, ways to share information across the planet with the flash of a hard drive or the crackle of a wireless card.

Suddenly the world is your audience, an informal jury that you've 'picked' from the die hard forum-trollers, the people they've forwarded the link to and the accidental youtube stragglers who've progressed from the boredom of picking their noses to a morbid, serial-clicking on track after track, DE after DE, through the "my mini is faster than a Z06 " posters to finally arrive....at your amateur PCA race video. Your video, where #XYZ did you wrong. Your flaming evidence, out there for the world to see, accessible everywhere at once; on home and office PCs, on a notebook while waiting for a plane, on an iPhone over drinks at a bar, in embedded posts, spoken about in foreign languages in hushed tongues.

But buried within this quagmire of captured parties lie a vested few. The few where small changes in behavior will yield big value in on-track enjoyment, safety and pride in a race run right. How are those few influenced by the overwhelming evidence before them? How do they react to the obvious departure from decorum? What does the group do with the evidence before them?

How does the lightning fast access to quality information influence the sport that we love and hold so dear? I'm interested in this question because it says a lot about us as a group and as human beings.

What triggered my thought was the posting of the crash in the Watkins Glen race last weekend. It had two significant results: 1. One driver who's choices started the mêlée apologized publicly - the result being that he was immediately being accepted by the group for upstanding sportsmanship (would he have done this had the video not been posted) and 2. One driver who amplified the effects of the first by through his choices shrunk into obscurity. I even sent a link to the original poster with glaring evidence of another time when the offender's choices were dubious. We all know who he is, but no one wants to talk about it until he himself comes forth and explains himself. What does that do to him? Is he likely to show up in the next race and if so, how will his behavior change?

There are many interesting facets to the above incident and the effect of technology (digital video and the internet). I'd like to start a thread that allows people to express how their driving styles, choices, awareness, and other actions have changed or are influenced by this newly available evidence. Hopefully we can have some constructive discussion about it. Perhaps even coming to some conclusions about when it should be used and when it, like some obscure and off-limits evidence, be left hidden in the bedside drawer.

We live in interesting times. Let's open the discussion.

Azzy.

RJay

As an offender or at least an instigator, I'll bite. Sure implicit in your tome is the notion that there is an ever present danger of things becoming far too PC and with transgressors subject to a virtual lynch mob. But, theres always danger when dealing with fools and frankly, I dont view the majority of even the 'I'm trying to make a point here' YT vids as any more harmful then rearing the next gen of drivers by watching NASCAR guys proclaiming 'bumpin is racin'. There is just as much possibility for good. 99% of the YT video I watch is positive or instructive at one level or another.

For example, with all the WGI vid around lately I think I've finally realized why I'm so friggin slow at WGI up through the esses. I'm simply on the wrong line. Not horribly wrong, but from all the recent pro vid I've watched up there recently I've come to realize that I'm just way to friggin late on turn in to the esses and thats why the car goes over the hump and sideways all the time when I try to push a little harder. I've got a different mental image in my head of how to get to the bus stop as a result and I expect, after my next trip there at the end of the month, YT will have played a significant role in dropping my times.

Heres an example of a public service vid I did last year after I spun on fluid and did possibly the silliest thing that anyone in that situation can do. I'll let the vid speak for itself, but when I posted it on the site the credits mention, it was lauded by a number of readers as it got them to think a little bit and they now were armed to deal with something similar in a far more potent way than had I simply issued a post describing it.