"How could a drivers association controlled by all individuals, possibly operate as a monopolistic body?"
You have misread what I wrote. What I said was that there is too much scope for a Driver's association to be abused.
In many cases the various bodies that control MSA karting have fallen over themselves for understandable, possibly predictable reasons.
Commercial classes for example were as much a response to engines fragile through overtuning and issues of difficult to detect deliberate non-compliances as they were to protecting traders' earnings. But once their dominance was assured and numbers started to drop as more drivers found they could kart satisfactorily outside the MSA aegis traders tried to maintain profit levels from a decreasing market.
What started as a genuinely 'good' intent became twisted into a practice that , as you say, now offends many karters.
However, as we can see on this forum, there is only a tiny number of karters who are prepared to make their voices known and getting a balanced viewpoint is not always simple.
Thus, a year or so down track, it is predictable that the Drivers Association would represent only a tiny fraction of drivers, with variable depth to their opinions. Let alone the difficulty of establishing who is entitled to have the opinion. How would you for example balance the opinion of a young novice cadet against a middle aged adult in a matter like track safety, or a well heeled Superone driver against a budget club karter on issues like kerb riding and nerfing off? How would you assess teh validity of an Drivers Association response, if you only got,as the Green Paper suggests, 12 responses out of 5000 licence holders?
There is a huge scope for misdirecting the power of any such association and those who would benefit from certain decisions would seek to influence those decisions, by for example, padding a ballot with 12 opinions supporting their view, while knowing that would normally be enough to swing the issue.
Indeed, it is one of my concerns about the Green Paper that many of the issues have been drafted in such a way as to appeal to the prejudice of a particular author rather than a discussion of issues. You actually have to look quite some way beyond the current politics of karting to get to solutions rather than plasters for various symptoms.
I'm not against a Drivers' Association, I just don't think it would have a sufficiently rigorous platform from which to judge issues and that its faults would become painfully obvious in the near future. (When, say, all its officials are linked through the same special interest groups, in the same way that the same names keep cropping up on the various MSA committees because they are the only people prepared to do the work).
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Paypal ebay by 'kartster' (08 Jan 2011 @ 0:07)
