David Hoots

The former longtime NASCAR race director on the projects he is working on now consulting with series on helping reshape rulebooks (2:00); where racing series sometimes get in trouble with rulebook language (4:00); his expertise in race procedures and studying how the NASCAR rulebook evolved over the decades (6:00); how it can help teams and competitors in many ways to have a better grasp of the rules (8:00); the difference of officiating a race from other professional sports (10:00); what does he think about whether racing series have too many rules in the major leagues because the teams are too good? (12:00); some history lessons on the genesis of rules in the Cup Series (14:00); the trickiness of issuing penalties consistently (16:00); helping teams navigate the potential fluidity of the rulebook and why it’s advantageous (18:00); how extra knowledge can help even with “unavoidable penalties” (20:00); real-world examples of how knowing in-race rules can benefit driver and crew chief (22:00); which teams and series where David has been consulting (26:00); is there anything that major-league series do to streamline their rulebooks? (28:00); how often David looks at rulebooks from past decades to see how things progressed (30:00); the importance of tribal knowledge in the era of Computer Animated Drawings and engineering (32:30); keeping innovation as a series moves into a spec car era (35:00); how involved David was in writing rules side as a race director (38:00); NASCAR’s move to eliminate racing back to the caution and how it was implemented in 2003 (41:00); the sea change of double-file restarts being instituted in 2009 and how that impacted calling races (43:30); what it was like changing race procedures that had five or six decades of history in NASCAR (46:00); adding electronic monitoring of pit speeds (49:00); what the 2019 season was like for David watching races from outside the tower for the first time since 1988 (50:00)

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