Originally Posted by
RogerH
There is a real dilemma in motor sport that Jim has touched on. In the past such classes as Formula Ford were highly popular with strongly contested large grids. These grids produced a lot of our current top drivers. Now FF is but a shadow of its former self and it is lucky to get a handful of cars.
Where have all the drivers gone to? I'm not too sure but we do seem to have much larger historic and classic grids than we did in the past so maybe this sort of racing is more attractive - at least to a large number of participants.
Despite the spectator numbers at the Hamilton races I don't think the NZV8s were the attraction - the crowds seem to have gone to see the Australian V8 Supercars. When you look at the grids and crowds at the NZV8 races over the last season, it wasn't much better than you get at some club and national meetings - in fact there were so few NZV8s racing that they failed to met the criteria to qualify as a MSNZ championship series (a minimum of 15 entrants at 75% of the races).
I agree with Jim that we need to have a starting series to attract the new young drivers but we don't seem to have produced the right sort of grid to attract them - maybe we have missed the boat completely in that we are trying to provide the sort of grids that interest us but the kids are more interested in Playstation and drifting - not circuit racing??