well,what can I say?I ll start by saying how saddened I am that a fellow karter does nt care about the demise of a local kart club,I like to think that most karters do care, especially those who supported the club and have expressed how much they have enjoyed racing at teesside this year.
your suggestion of "lack of" or mis-management I find equally saddening and completely un-founded.the chairman and committee are all unpaid volunteers and gave up a lot of their own time and effort to try and make the club successful and provide a safe,enjoyable and organised environment in which to race.the committee in my opinion from a management point of view contains some real talented successful businessmen inc Bob Shipman(chairman),Miles gardner and Chris Walton to name a few,the latter being instrumental in DYKC's revolutionary online entry/payment system which has received a lot of praise/interest from some of the higher echelon's in kart racing.
as regards the "books"I believe they are squeeky clean and totally transparent,and im sure if you wanted to see them Bob Shipman would oblige.
as about "list of creditors"I believe there are none,apart from the few members who had paid things like advanced entry's and 2010 memberships who are probably being re-embursed as i write this or in the very near future,in fact the only people in my knowledge who have lost money in this venture are committee member's Bob S,Chris W and Derrick Hardy all of whom contributed in total a sum of around £6k so that the club could purchase the latest supersport timing system/all associated software/auto entry gridding software/LED track display and new laptop etc.the aforementioned have written this loan off in the hopes that the equipment purchased will benefit a new or resurrected club in the future.
regarding your comment on pre -race scrutineering, I dont understand it,so will leave that one where it is,for now.
you mention that the club as an entity must know its market.
history has it that at a chance meeting between Bob's Shipman and Pope in late oct 08 spawned an idea to ressurect the old WLKC down at Teesside Autodrome.Very excitedly and within a few weeks, all the old members of WLKC with a few proposed new ones met with Bob Pope at Bob S's place.Bob P went on to explain how he would love to see his track as a prestige kart racing venue as it had been in the decade before and put it back on the map.we went on to discuss the pitfalls and poor history of MSA racing in the N/E regarding entry numbers revenue fees etc,and all admitted it was a bit of a gamble but we decided to go ahead with it anyway.at a meeting later we agreed to name the club DYKC at Bob P's suggestion.the committee also proposed the first meeting be in March to avoid most of the bad weather,however BP suggested we start in Jan as in his experience the teeside weather tended to be worse in March than it was earlier in the year.BP graciously agreed to waiver his track hire fee for the first 3 meetings,with the hope that by the 4th meeting we would be able to pay his track fee or some payment however in the event we could not,he would review the situation at the time,he rightly stated as a business that he had to make money but his priority was to get Teesside Autodrome back on the national map.with all this in mind we started the ball rolling with the old WLKC format of classes plus Billand and TKM as we had interest and subsequent memberships come in for these classes.the only other memberships we recieved from pro karters were from a couple of lads we believed ran their karts "modified" which under the then "ratpro" honda senior regs we would n't be permitted to do under the MSA banner,so having joined the club but not been able to race we offered to refund these men their membership fee,which they declined as one of the benefits of membership given to us by BP was cheaper practice fees.wanting and needing more entries the competition secretary and other committee members looked into the "tyro" regs for running prokarts.having ironed out the regs we realised our market would need to come from the prokart faithful up at warden law who run un-modified,however not having any contact details for these racers,and none of us wanting to turn up on WL race days and being perceived as poaching WL customers Chris W asked WL prokarter Mark Foster if he would discreetly ask the faithful if they would be interested in possible Tyro racing at teesside with an offer that the DYKC would even pay for their tyro licences as an incentive.to the best of my knowledge we received little feedback from this.as both tracks meetings are normally a couple of weeks apart we saw no harm in this.
your S1 front running teamate you refer to, I am assuming is Steve W.DYKC accepted Steve as a member as the only one in class as he needed to obtain upgrade signatures for his MSA licence so he could compete for the S1 TKM.to the best of my knowledge after these meetings early in the year that Steve attended I dont recall seeing him there again.
racers are racers,fact!I totally agree with you.you mention Jason parrot and Nigel Moore both exceptional and famous talents,the latter I know personally as he and my son are former team mates,but you must admit that while both these drivers love a drive in a prokart neither of these lads made their names/fame or reputation in prokarts and had they only ever driven prokarts we would now be saying"who" at the mention of their names.Im not having a go at prokarts or prokarters as you seem to imply in your message but having started out with my son in honda cadet we had some unpleasant experiences racing against " bent" gx160 engines ,the same power plant used in prokarts.afer being completely outpowered and humiliated after a couple of months of racing by an unscrupulous minority and then my son happening to get a shot on one of these animals conviced us that these showed too much variation,then to top it off i was shown a copy of "160 ways to power up your gx 160" on CD rom.soon after we went to WTP and never looked back in comparison.I also believe the bottom end power curve of a 4 stroke makes a more forgiving kart during driver error
as for your statement on MSA/non-MSA etc all i can say is that i am not a huge fan of the MSA,however if we run with them we can also influence them,vote with or against them etc I believe all big concerns need a governing body to preside over them,with punishable rules and regs including sports and motorsports.even sunday morning pub team football is governed by the same body as the premiership.
allen
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DYKC cancel 2010 season by 'rodgers' (08 Dec 2009 @ 13:55)
