Quote Originally Posted by John Nesbitt View Post
Sometimes a driver will start waving to warn following drivers about an incident immediately in front on the road. Again, the following driver will (should) have seen the incident and/or flag. The driver doing the waving is merely distracting himself from the task at hand, which is to safely navigate the incident zone.
John, I'm going to disagree with you on this one. While I agree with your characterization of "should have seen the incident and/or flag", we both know that's not always the case. There have been numerous times when someone has been tucked up under my ass (drafting, setting up for a pass, in formation toward the green flag) where a vigorous wave has gotten the attention of the passing driver to the situation at hand. In fact, in our driver's schools we actually teach drivers to wave during a race-start-wave-off.

Case in point, last weekend's crash at LRP. Had the leading driver waved vigorously to catch the attention of the trailing driver (assuming the leading driver had the clock cycles and car control availability to make that happen), I have zero doubt that this situation could have turned out differently.

Nope I strongly disagree, and should I be placed in that situation again I will most certainly warn the driver behind me of a dramatically changing situation via a vigorous hand/arm wave. If the trailing driver misinterprets a vigorous wave back-and-forth as a point-by, well, not my problem as it's obvious that person has totally lost situational awareness, and nothing else I could have done would have improved it...

Greg Amy


P.S., Nicely-done series. Looking forward to the next one(s). Please do consider combining all these into a PDF doc for future downloads.