Finish wrote:Is is possible/legal/advisable to listen to race control radio? It seems that doing so would advantage the team by allowing them to communicate
flag/corner worker info to the driver before the driver actually saw the flags. The team would also know when they were being black flagged and then head in that much sooner. Is anyone already doing this? Or is it frown upon?
Yes, it is possible as long as it's not a track with hardwired communications.. Even at some of those tracks there is still enough radio communication to the emergency vehicles to make it worthwhile.
Some professional series actually mandate that someone on a teams crew listens to race control so you can pass along information to the driver for black flags.. where to line up for restarts, etc.
Every radio system I've helped set up for a race car has had the crew chief set up to monitor the track as well as the Car/Driver.. I'd never want the driver to try to listen directly as there's far too much traffic at times.. Often we'd even set up a crew "talk around" channel so the crew could talk to each other and not bother the driver (No PL tone for the crew-crew chatter, PL tone to talk to the car/driver).
And as others have said you do not EVER want to transmit on the race control frequency.. so if you're using a radio that can "dual watch" to listen to the track and your team frequency you want to be 100% sure that you have transmit disabled for that side of the radio (if you have a radio with your team in A and the track in B.. set the transmit default to A)..
and if you're not 100% sure how to do that, use a scanner so it's impossible to accidently transmit..
-Nick