Quote Originally Posted by mdavis View Post
I still see no definition of "off-axis" impacts for IA's. This is something we got called out for at Lincoln 2013. I had a nice discussion with Mr. John Burford about this in the tech bay. He claimed that any off-axis impact would break our IA off and that we needed to add straps to retain the IA. I pointed out to him that while he may be right, there was no specified magnitude or direction of the off-axis impact that the IA needed to withstand in the rulebook, and therefore we were within the letter of the rules, and we didn't need to add the straps. I told him that if he wanted to call out teams on the off-axis loading condition, that there needed to be a standard test that was performed at the same time as other IA tests to prove that the IA was capable of handling such loading conditions. Apparently that conversation was forgotten when we rolled out of the tech area, or other things like header wrap and the noise levels of teams playing by the rules were deemed more important.
We had an identical conversation with a tech inspector at 2014 Michigan. We too were eventually found to be compliant, by the letter of the rules and the testing definition.