Quote:
Originally Posted by Strong Bad
Sorry kids but I personally think this means the bikes are fucked.
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I talked with Roger for about an hour about safety issues after his Baja 500 collision with a bike. One of his comment was something along the lines of “it’s stupid to have bikes and cars on the same course at the same time”. He also said he wouldn’t race in Baja again if bikes and cars were combined. Of course this was immediately after his incident, so he was still pretty wound up about it.
I started work on a partial solution to the bike/car problem right after Roger’s incident. It’s basically a small electronic box that goes on each race vehicle (bikes and cars), with an attached super loud beeper. In addition to many common tracker type functions (think IRC, SPOT, GPS, etc.), it would also warn both bikes and cars when they were coming closer together. A slower bike or car would be warned that something was coming up from behind, and a faster bike or car would be warned that they were approaching another bike or car. The warning would give the slower vehicle plenty of time to get out of the way, and plenty of time for the faster vehicle to wake up and watch out for something that might be hidden in thick dust just ahead.
Though separating the bikes from the cars is obviously the safest approach, if that isn’t economically and logistically practical, a collision warning system might be one good alternative, along with some of the other ideas people have pitched. When the Roger/SCORE dust settles a bit, I’ll remind Roger of my warning system concept and see if he’s interested. When I first pitched the idea to SCORE two years ago, I got zero response.