Hi mate,
Yeah, the sponsorship thing sounds like a good plan. I think the timber yard that is in Hinton might be a good start. I'll pop up there this weekend and try my luck
The biggest problem is a space to race in.... I'm looking at a piece of land towards Hazelbury Plucknett thats up for sale. It's about £15K for 1.5 Acres and would be perfect, but again...it'll come down to planning applications going through and is it even gets as far as me being able to put in an offer for it.
JCB, Mini diggers,
The original patch of land that the club was given was on the trading estate in Crewkerne. It was about as ideal of a location as I could have wished for... Unfortunately it came with a catch. We had to level the ground and remove 10,000+ tons of soil/rubble and then it would have been free rent for the first year.
I was quoted by a few companies for the work and got to £16,000 for removal and disposal...lots of issues surrounding soil movement and environmental issues.
I was a bit wary of the rental cost after the work had been carried out (if I had , had it done) being £5,400 for 12 months and since looking a bit further into land rental have found that it was about 4x more than the average... so that blew it out of the water.
It wouldn't have been a problem to have rented a mini digger or a JCB to do the work on the last piece of land (on the A356 going out of Crewkerne towards Merriott) but the highways agency have put a stop to us holding any events there because, regardless of road side marshal's directing traffic and any safety signs we could have put up, they consider the road to be too dangerous to have traffic turning in and out of a field....
All in all, it's been tough to find anywhere or anyone that will entertain us having a space and it's now come down to me looking into buying a piece of land.
It's the first and biggest hurdle for the club. I refuse to give up on it. We've got over 100 people on FB that have liked the page and clearly want to race in a local area... we just can't seem to get anyone to let us do it!
I even got to the point of begging my parents to let me use their garden (it's got ample room for a track lay out) sadly, my 77 year old step father isn't overly keen on it happening in his back garden
I have also approached the local Lions club and Round table, but again...neither are overly keen to help out......
If anyone has any ideas and would like to get involved in helping to get this off the ground, I would welcome the help. Give me a shout on here or add me as a friend on FB. There are 3 of us on the team at the moment, we could always do with a few more to help
many hands make light work, and all that!