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The cost of racing to the competitor in this country is such because the way racing is structured and funded has never changed.
The clubs go to the circuit owners for a date and they are given a price, then they add all the extras, Doctors, recovery, programmes etc and come up with a final figure they have to cover. Typical figure for a day at certain circuits being around £25,000. This is then covered by the competitor. The circuit has the gate money.
This is the way it has been for ages. The requirement is for other money to come into the sport, for this to happen the sport has to be sold better, be higher profile in the media and be exciting.
There are a lot of synergies between our sport and horse racing but look how they run things.
Betting is a major player, there is no reason that can not be the case with motor racing, its simple to put together a good system if you forget how we run races now.
How come the three o'clock at Lingfield on a Wednesday afternoon, which lasts about eight minutes and has ten runners has a sponsor with £5,000 worth of prize money, yet we have nothing for a well fought 20 minute race at Brands on a Sunday afternoon. Because we have not moved on from 40 years ago, we still run our sport as a rich boys playtime as it was in the 1950's.
We need the sports profile to be lifted, more effort by circuit owners, clubs and competitors to sell races and race meetings as a viable means of advertising for third parties. To do this though the product has to be good!
I'm sure every organiser would like to charge the competitor nothing to compete and get their money from elsewhere but a shift has to take place from funding the individual to funding the event. When this happens we can expect lower costs as a competitor.
This is getting away from the original thread a bit, but these are the sort of individual ideas which need to be put into the survey so they can see where we need to change. Whether anything happens is another matter, but you can't change anything if you don't put down what you really feel.
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