By Michael Gougis

DMG/AMA Pro Racing President Roger Edmondson admits that race officials may have played a game of selective enforcement on some riders in 2009, and says there will be changes in officiating personnel, in the rules and in the way the rules are enforced for the 2010 AMA Superbike series.

In a telephone interview with Roadracingworld.com, Edmondson says that for next season the jump start policy will be reviewed, time penalties will be removed from the rulebook, and that final authority for race weekend operations will be vested solely in Director of Competition Colin Fraser.

“We are not insensitive to the criticisms that people have raised,” Edmondson says. “Not everything is fixable. But we will fix what is fixable.”

In 2009, some of the rules and procedures introduced for the new season turned out to work poorly in practice, or at least to not offer any advantages. Edmondson already has announced that the rolling starts used in Daytona SportBike this season will not return, and the use of the pace car/motorcycle will be dramatically curtailed.

Edmondson says that more changes are in the offing.

“I’m confident that we will see some changes in personnel, and we have some rules where the penalties do not meet the crimes,” Edmondson says. “Those will be changed, and we will do that before the beginning of the season so that the penalty we assess at the beginning of the season will be the same that we assess at the end of the season.”

One of the most controversy-generating rules has been the jump start penalty. The AMA’s rulebook says the same thing as the MotoGP and World Superbike rulebook no forward motion in the rider’s grid box from the time the starting lights go on until the lights go out and the race begins. However, Edmondson says, the way the rule has been enforced has not been the same here as it has been overseas.

“There is no room for judgment as the rule is written and we use the same rule as in World Superbike and MotoGP,” Edmondson says. “But when the world officials used it, they may have used judgment, and we didn’t. I think the FIM officials know what to see and what not to see. We should not have judgment calls on whether or not it happened. We should have judgment calls on the severity and whether or not there was an advantage.”

Despite saying after Road America (where five riders were issued ride-through penalties in a single American Superbike race) that ride-through penalties would no longer be assessed for incidental grid movement that didn’t result in a competitive advantage, Edmondson now says, “But once we had affected one guy’s points situation, we determined that the only thing we could do is to enforce the rule the same way until the end of the season. Now, that’s only because that rule did not endanger someone’s life and limb. But as a sporting consideration, we felt we had to be consistent.” (Edmondson did not address the implications of one rider’s points situation being unfairly affected by selective enforcement while another’s was not.)

Time penalties assessed against a racer will be gone for next season, because fans need to be able to rely on what they saw happen at the track, Edmondson says. It is confusing for the fan base to see one rider cross the finish line first and then read the next day that someone else has been declared the winner.

“Those (time penalties) are going to go away. People need to believe what they see on the track. It shouldn’t be affected by something that they don’t see happening on the track,” he says.

Edmondson admits that some of the penalties and official calls were not of the caliber he wants to see. And he conceded that officials may have singled some riders out for extra scrutiny.

“You’ve gotta be blind. I’m going to tell you my standing orders to my officials. We need to know what the circumstances are, what the facts are, and only after we know all of that and the penalty has been determined should we find out who it is,” Edmondson says, without explaining how that policy would prevent selective enforcement or additional scrutiny of one rider versus another by grid marshals reporting alleged violations to operational decision-makers. “And I’m not so sure everyone on the staff understands that yet.

“On any given weekend, there are only a handful of us who are full-time paid professionals. There are a lot of well-meaning volunteers, and this is the way they participate in the sport they love. Frankly, we are going to have meetings about the performance of people, and some of them are not going to be invited back.”

Edmondson declined to identify who might be on the chopping block, saying that the review process was not yet underway.

Edmondson says that in the final years of the previous AMA administration, a leadership vacuum created a situation where well-meaning people stepped up to deal with issues that arose on race weekend. As an example, he pointed to the incident where Miguel DuHamel was told by a race official that the Honda rider could continue in the Daytona 200 on a backup bike when the rules clearly did not allow that. The downside, obviously, of having multiple people dealing with different issues is that there is no single person of final authority, and that is a situation that cannot continue into 2010, Edmondson says.

“What you have is a multi-headed structure. That will not happen next season. The chief steward has to be in complete control. Colin is going to be in complete control at the track next season; what happens well will be to his credit, what happens badly will be to his discredit,” Edmondson says.

“There’s never been a perfect race weekend. Something will go wrong. We try to be perfect. But it’s never going to happen.”