Keep in mind all of my opinions are from an observer's standpoint, but having crewed strictly for cars competing in ITA for the last 4 years in this region I've kept quite a keen eye. Prior to this year with all the weight changes the cars battling for first were usually the same 3, sometimes only 2 battling closely for the top spot. Just from the past I noticed a lot of contact up front in the ITA races but since there were only a couple top guys a couple seconds ahead of the rest of the pack it wasn't such an issue and maybe not much of an actual "race" ensued and the rest of the field, was, for the most part pretty incident free. The field was also pretty spread out so that helped keep incidents low. Now with more equality, and coincidentally I think more talent and better developed cars, the battle for first stretches now among 5 and sometimes to 7 or 8 cars all within a second as far as times go. And add to that this is spread among 5 different types of cars so there on-track capabilites differ depending where on the track they are. I think that is the big change. Now throw a different class that qualifies in the top 10 of this field with even more varied capabilites in car and driver and it can make it tough.

I think if this was 3 years ago, none of these issues would have come up, but with the ITA field being more competitive, car counts going up, the # of different cars competing and how much the times are falling in light of all of this, it makes for some additional "love taps" that you didn't see just a few years ago. So, I don't think it's ITA drivers just being more aggressive than any other class, but in the NER at least the battle for the top 5 spots in ITA can be any one of 7-8 guys with just as many different cars. That's gonna make for some tight racing and unfortunately topics like this coming up. So, another region may not see any of these problems at all as the landscape of cars can change quite a bit from region to region. I think ITA in the NER is probably one of the most competitive in the country, lots of really fast cars and drivers to match.

Not much of a solution for either side, but just my humble opinion as to why you're seeing this.

Hopefully it can be worked out amicably.

steve