I don´t know about you all, but I was completely wrong about the kick. I needed to see, frame by frame, enlarged overhead stuff from the chopper to understand that what I thought I saw was not what happened.
I have read all the comments and they are almost all accurate if the facts are as each writer believes they are. But I was a member of Race Control for two years back in the 500 days and we had nothing except, at most, a feed camera shot and some black and white security camera footage. Now Race Control is Big Brother, but what is going to CAS is a lot more that video. If what I have been told is accurate, Rossi´s attorney will present the data acquisition feed from both bikes. That data ¨belongs" to the FIM whenever they require it the same way the authorities can require teams to hand over data for investigations. We assume that Race Direction would have had the same access, but maybe they didn´t. Maybe they wanted to get a decision taken on the day. They would have come in for more criticism yet if there had been no initial decision taken.
It was always obvious that there would be an appeal beyond the FIM. I don´t know why Lin Jarvis said there could be no appeal unless he either didn´t know or was only referring to the FIM process.
The CAS usually needs months to make a judgement, so it seems likely that, unless they throw the case out immediately, unlikely given the complexity, then they will probably kick the can up the road toward Qatar 2016 and Rossi, while the case is under consideration, will start from where he qualifies in Valencia.
Until we actually know what the "black boxes" contain, we won´t really know enough to make moral pronouncements. It still looks like Rossi was out of line, but it sure looked like he kicked Marquez too. He did slow too and Race Direction is saying that his slowing is what caused Marc to crash. That, I suspect, is what Rossi´s attorney will call to question. Race Direction has already said that it not illegal to slow the pace, as Marc was allegedly doing through some curves. Data acquisition will determine whether this is true.
Jack Miller at the end of last year was running Alex Marquez wide often, but, apparently, there is no foul unless the other rider crashes or the rate of slowing is judges to be....what? There I go, guessing at what is fair and what is foul. Precedents are going to be set by this decision.
It is a shame it has come to this. It is bad for the sport, but it is important to get this right since the technology is there to allow the truth to come out. The truth is always worth waiting for.