Peter, that’s exactly what should happen. Think of it as forced arbitration or mediation. Both drivers report to the designated area. An official finds Driver 1 and says we have a report from T6 that your car 73 and Car 37 made contact at the T6 apex. Can you explain what happened? Official then goes to Driver #2 and says we have a report from T6 that your car 37 and 73 tangled at the apex. Can you explain what happened?
If the drivers agree, shake hands, agree racing incident or somebody apologizes, no other drivers impacted, no extenuating circumstances like this was during a FCY or Local Yellow, etc the official can release them. The official gets their separate stories first then the drivers can chat with each other about the incident, shake and make up or agree to disagree. The official is there mediating. Official still has the option of calling for the writing paper or one of the drivers may protest. But the basic idea is that if you know you have to face the guy you just punted or may punt in a dive bomb pass, perhaps we’ll all be a little more civil out there. And if there is damage to repair, it can be noted in the log books, and the contact investigation can also be noted in the log book (damage or not) if warranted.
This is going to call for some judgement to implement. That’s why the definition of “significant body contact†was added. CRB was trying to set some basic boundary conditions. If there’s side-by-side contact, both drivers continue, nothing but a tire donut or easily buffed out scrapes, I don’t expect that to be written in a log book and it should be a pretty short and reasonably amicable discussion afterwards. But if your contact resulted in significant damage to the other guys car, you punted him off course, etc, I would expect that contact written into your log book. Enough of those contacts written up, with or without official points on your license and we can have a nice basis for a driver review.
Tracks you frequent may be different, but the ones I race out here, Pit lane and BF station is not the place to have those conversations. It may be the place to flag a driver and tell them to report to the DIIS location however. As noted above I feel one of the important aspects of this rule is drivers talking to other drivers face-to-face about an incident in a controlled (mediated) environment.
Todd,
In addition to dismissing other reasons for stopping a driver, you've limited your example to the lowest level of contact. We have to deal with the full range of on track behavior. The initial assessment of a driver's state of mind by an experienced steward should be the first step. That takes seconds. Allowing drivers to get out of their cars first opens up the possibility of more than a mediated discussion. The last thing we want is the infield at Bowman Gray Stadium.
As proposed, the rule doesn't specify where the incident investigation is to take place. Left up to individual regions/tracks, some will chose pit lane. Others will do it in impound. The important thing is that each region is free to implement this in a way that works best for their situation. Requiring the location be one place or another will adversely affect some situations and make the exercise more of a burden than a solution.