[Cynette]

We had some new Safety Advisor experiences at FLR this year.

First off, several of our Advisors were actually safety professionals. That was refreshing!

Gone are the safety tokens. These are replaced by a written recommendation form that the team Safety Captain can use to recognize another team's efforts, making it more like the GP nomination form.

The Safety Captains were also asked at their Captains' meeting on Thursday to sign up for a 10 minute time slot to talk to the Safety Advisors on Friday about their team's safety program. Our Safety Captain took our safety manual and reveiwed our year-round safety program with the advisors. His efforts resulted in 1511 being recognized as one of the Top 4 Safety Teams. That was done without gimmicks, without annoying the other teams, based on the strength of our year-round safety program and with our pit crew and drive team just doing what they know they are supposed to do. That to me was a HUGE improvement over the past years' experiences.

I also know the team that won the UL Safety Award at FLR has a very strong year-round program. They do use give aways to promote safety to all the other teams, but they have a very specific focus at the regionals they attend to make sure each team has access to a kit to contain / clean-up a leaking battery.

I liked the new emphasis at FLR! The change gave promoting a safety culture within your team all year round more importance than promoting it during the competition alone.