A mate/colleague is thinking about taking up motor racing because he’s had enough, for now, of track days, but he has a problem.
Well, beyond the usual problem that motor racing’s really expensive and saps all of your resources.
His problem is that, like a lot of people with families, naffing off for a weekend to spend the best part of two days and £800 rocking around a race track is a pretty hard sell to the rest of his family. So, he wonders, “why don’t they hold some races on a weekday?”
His reckoning is that he’d pay more for a race day than a track day, in the knowledge that he’d get a known amount of solid practice, qualifying and then a race or two; rather than driving at track days, which are often punctuated with much slower (or faster) cars and drivers, rules about where you can pass, and people falling off and getting a session stopped. Plus, it would be more exciting.
His feeling is that he’d pay a lot more if he got to do some racing for the day, and that it’s preferable to bunk off from work than bunk off from the family. The number of people who do track days during the week suggests that the market might just be there, ripe for persuading. Whether the organisational capacity, staffing and ability to make racing levels of noise are there is another matter, I suppose. But he might be on to something.
Kris Meeke's dramatic WRC victory
Fans fairly exploded with excitement on 12 March when Kris Meeke, driving a Citroën C3 in the World Rally Championship, won the Rally Mexico in dramatic style.
Per the official WRC website: “Just 750 metres from the end of the 21.94km Derramadero Power Stage, Meeke’s car drifts wide on a right-hander and slides off the road, through a hedge at the side of the road and into... a spectator car park!”
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Kris Meeke incident
Maybe Mexico has a rather more lax health and safety discipline, but the fallout would have been the same for Citroen/Meeke if someone had died and could have been the end of these latest exciting regulations....in much the same way as Group B did through no fault of the cars.
WRC need to take control of the layout of stages for the good of its participants.