Originally Posted by
ERC
Thanks for the reports on the race and the interesting TV aspect. I feel much better for that!
As the Sytner/Morton team kept accurate lap charts (which was the norm, even for F1 teams years ago with a triple analogue stopwatch board - stopped, running, ready) it is almost impossible to get it wrong, just as long as the scorer presses the lever each time the car goes past. They are used to watching just their own car and it is/was very rare to miss it.
As I remember it, at Manfeild, each timer wrote the lap time on a pad so I am not sure if the above mentioned 'flip pad' system was in addition to the time keeper's or was combined? Maybe someone will know?
If combined, it was far from fool proof and even lap times could be very dubious, as in handicap racing particularly, if they failed to spot a car until it was past the finish line, that lap would be a second or two longer than normal, meaning that the next lap would then be a second or two quicker, leading to some weird 'fastest laps'! The same applied to timekeepers at other circuits of course.
As always, the timekeeper was a judge of fact, but the stewards could have accepted the Morton/Sytner pit crew's summary and compared it to the Petch charts, (I assume they were doing the same?) as it is extremely difficult to fake - especially given the time scale - as the cumulative time and the individual lap times could have been tied to the TV coverage, particularly the pit stops, which was of course filmed and broadcast live.