SuperOne seems to be a contradiction in terms for many people.
On the one hand it is quite clearly aimed at an elite, people who can spend the time and money to race against other people who can also spend the time and money.
As the recent video pointed out, simply to stay up at the sharp end, one has to pay at least £500 a week, on the grounds that you have to race every week and you have to do practice and you have to get to the tracks so that you can race every weekend.
That's £26 k before you start to have expensive incidents or other problems.
And even there, one is up against people who can afford and are willing to pay at least twice that, which presumably adds benefit.
There are only three people who can get on the podium at any race.
At the same time, the forum is filled with complaints about the cost by people who cannot match that level of commitment and budget, but who simply won't get involved in racing in championships at the clubman level on the grounds that their time and budget is taken up with competing in SuperOne.
The frequently heard reason is that the standard in Clubman is too low, which might be true except that the times seen at the top end of clubman racing are comparable. Should some of those complaining join in at the clubman level then the standards will rise.
It might lead to a number of posts saying that clubman championships have become too expensive because it's filled up with people willing to pay £30k a year instead of £10k or less but that's another issue.
Frankly, I don't believe the 'driving standards' argument. Quite often I hear parents proudly announcing that their child has entered SuperOne in his novice year and not come last, but not come in the top ten either, so I suspect that either I meet a lot of extraordinarily talented drivers or more likely that the difference is simply paddock hype, like gizmos to make one go faster. A novice a few months off his black plates is unlikely to be markedly faster than the rest of a clubman grid, and we simply don't hear of large numbers of novices / early drivers regularly winning their club races, at least not in the numbers that sign up for SuperOne.
I'm not knocking SuperOne, it has its place as an elite series for people who are extraordinarily talented and / or can spend large sums of money. However, to enter a series which has that reputation when you have neither a history of regularly winning your club series nor the budget to compensate by polishing an ordinary talent and then complain about it being the preserve of the rich or very talented is simply contradictory.
In the old days, one had to qualify to be a SuperOne driver and the qualifying rounds were filled with the hopeful. Now one merely has to put down money.
Getting rid of the qualifying rounds clearly made sense financially, and I would not presume to tell people how to spend their money.
But please, can we stop complaining about 'the cost' when there are other options more appropriate to the budget.
And yes, there seems to be a direct correlation between the growth of IKR, independent tracks holding on to their customers by various means and the percentage of drivers who only follow a series. At a guess, MSA drivers now represent less than a tenth of all regular kart drivers, one only has to see the 60 or more drivers attending a Buckmore Park commercial event, many of whom are regulars, to see that in action. Inevitably that means that MSA costs per head must rise as the number of regular MSA drivers shrinks.
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