OK, so you protest them for talking to their road crew under outside assistance or Rule 2 if that's warranted. In that scenario, the issue isn't the tracking, it's talking to the support team, period.
Mike
Read the SIs. That's legal.
I've met your road crews. Nice folks for certain! But you can talk to them all day long and it wouldn't bother me. Same goes for ours...hell...I once hired a forecaster who was more consistently wrong than if I wet my finger and stuck it in the air. I get the perception - but reality is that talking to people while you are sailing up the coast really doesn't offer much more than a distraction from sailing fast.
So making excuses ,valid or not, makes breaking the rules OK? I'm done. You guys know way too much about distance races and rules for me.
Just having fun with you but I didn't think we were talking about breaking rules. I thought you said that it was legal in the SI's to talk to your ground crew during the race.
You want to get me fired up, lets talk about really light air sailing at 1am and your competition (with whom you were sailing side by side with before they turned) has their ground crew meet them in the surf 1/4 mile short of the finish line and then run their boat to the finish line beating you by 5 or 10 minutes. The SI's said that your ground crew could meet you in the surf so I was pretty stuck without much to lodge a protest against - in the case there might have actually been a protest committee. I complained to the race committee that it wasn't very sporting and you can just imagine the response I got back. I then presented taking the case to the extreme of a really light air start and suppose a ground crew walked/ran the boat up the coast a couple of miles in the surf. Not much of a conversation piece that was either.
