The locations of the national rounds this winter are due to one thing - a lack of suitable applicants from other areas of the country! If there had been applications submitted from the south east that met the requirements then they would have been awarded a round - simple.
High Wycombe applied, but we didn't get a round because of our venue size. I have no complaints about this, and have told Cris that we are here if needed as an emergency venue at any time.
My concern about the nationals is that the new rules (for both cars and tracks) means that lots of clubs are being prevented from applying to host meetings. High Wycombe is an OK size for an RC18, an FTX Blaze or even a SWB shark, but it's simply not big enough for a LWB shark or a Carisma GT14B. It's supposed to me 'micro', and yet the cars are now larger than a 1/12th scale car!
The 1/12th section struggles to find suitable venues for its nationals because the cars need such large tracks - micro is going the same way I'm afriad. We will be racing on 1/10th buggy tracks with cars that aren't much smaller than a B44 before long!
Date clash permitting, I would support and race in a south east regional series, and would happily host a round at the High Wycombe club.
One thing I have noticed develop with the micro class is the significance of which club people come from. I can go to a 1/12th or 1/10th tc national and not be able to tell you which club half the people are from. Yet at a micro national it is immediately obvious due to who's pitting with who and what people have written on their t-shirt.
Micro club racing at High Wycombe is really struggling - 2 years ago we could expect to get more than 20 drivers quite easily, but recently we haven't been breaking into double figures, and a couple of weeks ago there were only 4 of us. Why do we think this is?
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