Auckland Car Club: Magazine Race Report - October

Slow but sure progress!!!

Well the Season is now underway and by the time you get this Newsletter it will about the time for our second race meeting on Sunday 31 October at Hampton Downs.  The Father’s Day meeting went well, albeit somewhat quiet with a relatively small field in A5 grids, it’s good to see the Season underway.

 Recently I took the opportunity to meet with the Series Co-ordinators of the 3 classes that run at our meetings, being Production Muscle Cars, Northern Muscle Cars and the Classic Japanese Series.  The meeting is part of an ongoing improvement of dialogue between the Club and these Classes so that we can improve racing for them as well as for other Club members who run at our Series.

 A few of the points that have come out of that meeting are worth noting:

1. There has been a suggestion that Saturday meetings may actually be acceptable to people as an alternative to Sundays.  But everyone likes having their Sundays tied up racing and we will certainly look at this in the future.
2. While we’re committed to having a round at Taupo on a Sunday, the date now being 10 April 2010, a Saturday meeting down there in the future would be preferable.  This enables people to travel down Friday night or very early Saturday, race Saturday and then have a good night out with their friends and competitors on Saturday night.  For 2012 we will certainly look at this.
3. For the 2010/11 Season, we had originally planned on having eight race meetings.  We booked this many dates knowing full well we could lose one or two of these over time.  That’s now transpired and we are down to seven meetings for the current year with the April Hampton Downs being dropped as it is too close to the Taupo round.  We do appreciate that people like a bit of a gap between their race meetings.  This occurred simply because we got squeezed out of our original date by Hampton Downs to accommodate some other meetings.  For 2011/12 on we will probably drop the 5 September meeting because of the clash with Muscle Car Masters and the general view that that meeting is too early in the Season.  Our first meeting will therefore be later in October and we will run through to the first Sunday in May and the Series will comprise six race meetings spread between Pukekohe, Hampton Downs and another single round hopefully at Taupo still to continue.
4. At race meetings we are also going to look at trying to have classes based around single locations.  This is particularly the case for the Muscle Car Classes and Classic Japanese.  The aim here is if these groups be close enough together so they can have a beer and a barbecue afterwards without having to travel long ways around the pits.
5. We’ve explained to the Series Co-ordinators that in fact that we have only been breaking even on our race meetings at the last few events.  The cost of race meetings are naturally going up and this is not helped by the fact that Motor Sport New Zealand are charging us more for levies and other costs to run these meetings.  Naturally Hampton Downs is much more expensive than Pukekohe to run a meeting at but then ultimately the facilities there will be better.  There is obviously a trade off between these two.  As such, we have had to make a small increase and now charges for race meetings to cover these increased costs as well as the increase in GST.  We regret having to do that but at the end of the day the Club has to make money to survive.

 The race meeting dates for the rest of the Season are as follows and to comprise the usual Classes of Muscle Production, Northern Muscle, Classic Japanese, Racing Saloons as well as Production Saloons and Targa Cars combined.

 31 October                    Hampton Downs

28 November               Pukekohe

23 January                   Pukekohe

20 February                 Hampton Downs

10 April                         Taupo

1 May                            Pukekohe

 Please also note that the Star Cars will run at the October, November and January meetings and May meetings and the Formula Firsts will run at our Pukekohe meeting in January.

 Finally, have a look at our new website (www.aucklandcarclub.org.nz).  We would love to receive links from you, be they pictures or YouTubes to put up there so if you have any, please send them through to either myself being nigelsmith@raceataucklandcarclub.org.nz or Sally Herbert sally@covisory.com.  The more the better and we hope to be able to change these regularly.

 For those of you and our associated classes being the Muscle Cars and Classic Japanese, we would love to receive copies of your newsletters and get these up on the web together with any race reports or other material that you have.  We will also provide links across to your websites from ours.

 Finally, we’re working with the Historic Racing Club to run a Winter Series in 2011 as a joint venture.  More details of this to follow in the New Year.

As always, if there is anything we can do to help improve racing for you, I look forward to hearing from you.  All the best for this Season.