All is fair from the burnout box to the finish line. Any tendency or weakness, anything that will lead to my opponent being less sharp, or making a mistake, it's my duty to exploit it.
This usually pertains to points racing, either on the local or Divisional level, where I know my opponents, and we are out for blood. I'm at a Mopar, or specialty race, or just a friday night deal, I race straight up, plain vanilla, could care less what happens.
I've never understood the "just race my lane" crowd...I'm not trying to cut a perfect light, and make a perfect run, I'm trying to beat the guy beside me, sometimes that means being better, sometimes it just means being less worse!!!

I'm statistically much better on the tree when I stage last (pro tree, heads up) and more than a few of my competitors know that, so they try to wait, and a burndown ensues. I MUST defend my right to go in last, if I gave in and staged first, everyone who saw that would say, 'I'm gonna hang Billy out, and make him go in". When they see me in a long burndown, and see the starter in my side glass more than once...then they decide, "it's not worth it against him, I'll just stage".

I'm no different than a batter who studies, and keep stats on pichers, to get an advantage, and know what's coming. I don't play games, everything is pre-meditated, based on who I am racing.

I'll give one example:
There is a Super Street racer from Nor-Cal, who is deadly on the tree, just amazing. Doesn't always race the big-end well, but the best leaver in Division 7. While watching him with my buddies, we discovered he always lets the other racer turn on the top bulb first, then double bulbs. So we decided to force him to turn his top bulb on first then have to wait for us to turn on ours (courtesy stageing), it was weird, having a burndown before the first bulb was even on, but it worked!! He lost to 3 AZ racers, 3 division races in a row, with sub-par lights...he even approached me and made the comment, "Man, you AZ guys take a long time to pull up to the tree!!!"