Somethings been playing on my mind

[Si Coe]

Not sure if this is a rant, comment, question, discussion or what. Its just something thats been eating at me since yesterday and I want to get it off my chest.....

Last Saturday our regular race controller rang me up to say he couldn't make Sunday due to a family issue. I'd promised my wife I wasn't going racing because we've got a baby due next month and we still need to paint the nursery, but as the only available race controller I agreed so the meeting could go ahead.
Literally everything possible went wrong.
Track problems, generator problems, timing problems, complaints about marshals - it was never ending. I seriously considered packing up and going home, but with all these people booked in I felt I couldn't.
Then, near the end someone who was a visitor to the club made some comment to me about how he felt it wasn't a very well run club and he wasn't impressed.

Now I'm not really complaining about the comment. Its something I've heard plenty of times at other places, about other clubs, directors, drivers etc. Its a standard part of racing.
No - what bothers me is that if I hadn't come along there would have been no meeting at all. And during the meeting I was very very seriously thinking about packing away and going home.

Then it occurred to me that the people that run the meetings, no matter how badly, are what makes racing possible. Drivers naturally expect a slick, professionally run meeting but often never consider what goes on behind the scenes to do that. They complain when things don't go right, but so few actually try run a meeting themselves.

So you know what? I may be a terrible race controller but at least I've tried. Because if people like me don't, there won't be any racing left.