The paper presents a verification of the IEEE Root Contention Protocol as an illustration of a new and innovative approach for the verification of real-time distributed systems. Systems are modeled with basic Gurevich abstract state machines (ASMs), and requirements are expressed in a first order timed logic (FOTL). FOTL is undecidable, however the protocol we study is in a decidable class of practical interest. Advantages of this framework are twofold: on the one hand, a great expressive power which permits in particular an easy treatment of parameters, on the other hand the modeling task is simplified by an adequat choice of tools.