The TDA races returned to form in the Third Night, with an exciting evening of hard hitting match-ups, SpeedChannel on site and the upset of the year taking place in the second round (when Stranglehold defeated Orange Crush). However, the grand majority of these elements were lost in the wake of Johnny Ryan’s driver’s door hit on Wilson in the opening race between Orange Crush and Damage, Inc. It’s hard to stay focused on the light-hearted frivolity and gamesmanship at play in a sport when you witness a potentially life-changing hit on the field. It’s fun to talk about someone ‘killing’ another car or ‘putting the hurt’ an opponent, but this is only true when people aren’t actually getting injured.
Lost amongst the debate about what Ryan’s intent was or whether Ryan’s hit was even a driver’s door shot was the most major issue that the TDA faces: there are absolutely no rules, standards or bylaws in place about driver’s door hits.
Every bit of heated vitriol coming out of the pits, every suggestion that the TDA ownership favors Orange Crush and every conspiracy theory that explains that Ryan is out on the track looking for blood stems from this one fact. There are no rules, standards or bylaws in place about driver’s door hits. As a matter of fact, there are more stipulations in the TDA rulebook about the beauty contest than there are about driver’s door hits.
People can debate endlessly about whether Ryan laid a driver’s door hit on Wilson or crashed into his backdoor and continued forward because there are no standards for what constitutes a driver’s door hit. I looked at Wilson’s car after it was towed to the Damage, Inc pits and saw that Ryan had collided with Wilson on the driver’s side, with a little more than a foot of his bumper in front of Wilson’s driver’s door seam. Is that a driver’s door hit? I have no idea because there isn’t anything written about what defines an illegal hit.
Since I became intimately involved with the TDA at the end of the 2009 season, it has been explained to me time and again that there are only two on-field rules. 1) You have to go outside the tires for a lap to count and 2) driver’s door shots are illegal. It turns out that that is only half true. Driver’s door shots are not actually illegal, if we follow the letter of the law in the TDA rulebook.
In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, Major League Baseball had a major problem with steroids. Use of steroids was frowned upon and supposedly illegal, but baseball didn’t have any rules about it. According to The USA Today, “MLB had no official policy on steroid use among players [before 2002].”
Even if Mark McGwire had come out and injected himself with anabolic steroids in front of an ESPN camera crew, baseball wouldn’t have had much recourse. What he was doing wasn’t illegal and there certainly weren’t any prescribed punishments for the action.
There seems to be a similar predicament currently surrounding driver’s door shots in the TDA. While driver’s door shots are certainly a safety concern for all involved and bad for the sport, there’s nothing specifically preventing them; there aren’t any rules forbidding it or punishments that have been laid down to deter future hits.
What makes this current situation with Ryan/Wilson so dramatic and pointed is the fact that Ryan has been embroiled in comparable situations several times before.
On a personal level, I like Ryan. I enjoy talking with him and genuinely respect the competitive streak he has. He is somehow able to motivate himself to drive as hard as possible for every race, whether he’s gunning for the championship or racing against Damage, Inc in the first round. No matter the situation, Ryan will go all out in an effort to win. When Ryan smacked into Wilson on Saturday, Orange Crush seemed to have the race wrapped up. Not only that, but Wilson didn’t have any laps to his name. A lot of people suggested that Ryan could have just laid off, but that’s not the way he races. He races hard and he races tough. If he’s on the track and there’s an opponent moving, Ryan has him in his crosshairs. And there is nothing wrong with that.
The problem with this constant attack mode though is that Ryan ends up hitting a fair amount of driver’s doors that he shouldn’t. Ryan is a smart driver and has no particular desire to see his fellow drivers in the hospital. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from his racing style though because it hasn’t changed at all over the course of the last two years in spite of any questionable hits he might have had. But therein lies the rub: there has never been a single reason for him to change. Not only haven’t there been any consequences for Ryan’s driving (save for one fine in the 2010 season, a number that matches the number of fines Steve Gursky Jr. also received that year), but his all-out style actually helps him: he is one of the most intimidating and feared drivers in the TDA for this very reason.
What was most surprising about Johnny and Pete Ryan’s disqualifications during Third Night was simply that they happened. Nowhere in the TDA rulebook are there any mentions of penalties that will befall a driver if he hits an opponent in his driver’s door. Literally anything that was decided upon as a punishment could have been met with the question: where did that come from?
Due to the circumstances of Saturday night, the TDA finds itself in an interesting position and one that has a large silver lining to it: the TDA is finally in a spot where it can put several broad and sweeping safety rules (and commensurate punishments) in place that will, among other things, end the discussions of whether something is or isn’t a door shot.
Keep the Mel Noble Jr. Helmet Rule in effect. Also hold onto the rule penalizing drivers for leaving their car during a race in a non-emergency situation. Add in a rule that will forbid drivers from racing without a working safety restraint—just about every driver I know has raced at least once without a seatbelt, which still strikes me as ridiculously unsafe—and clearly specify what makes up a driver’s door hit. To accomplish the latter, I am partial to a measurement of how much the offender’s bumper crosses in front of the driver’s door seam. If something looks like a driver’s door hit on the field, wait until the cars are towed to the pits and look at the damage. If more than X number of inches of the hitter’s bumper is in front of the driver’s door seam that is an illegal hit, no ifs, ands or buts. Throw in a penalty system that consists of team disqualifications and individual driver suspensions (a warning on the first offense, a one race suspension for a second offense, five races for a third offense, life for a fourth offense) and driver’s door hits will cease.
Wilson is doing as well as can be expected right now; sore, but recovering. For his sake and the sake of potential future victims of driver’s door hits, let’s hope that something is put into place to ensure as much safety as one can when dealing with a sport involving huge cars crashing into one another.