How much is your £ worth?
By TMX Archives on 5th Apr 11
Just what is a fair price to pay for a day's motorcycle racing? Editor JD checks-out two very different Sundays' of sport.
TOOK a day off from work last weekend – so by way of a change headed straight to a motorcycle event! In this case my annual visit to a road-race to view things from the tarmac based angle of two-wheel sport. Donington Park was the venue, World Superbikes the event. And it was all quite a contrast to the International MX at Hawkstone Park the previous weekend, with no single winner, both having plus and minus points. But is there anything we can learn from our knee-down, tarmac scraping siblings?
The main difference is one dear to all our hearts – money. Especially at this moment in time when we are all shovelling our walking around cash into filling station fuel pumps. Once you've emptied your wallet filling your motor with juice the fact of the matter is there's not much left for doing anything once you've reached your destination.
The admission fee to events is now more crucial than ever before. So here's a contrast, Hawkstone £20 per person. Donington £55 on the gate.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the MX corner won that round. I hear every argument going as to why admission to events needs to be £XX because of this, that and the other. I hear them all and believe most of the arguments. However, we can all talk until we are blue in the face, the public (me and you) isn't actually even remotely interested in promoters' problems, only in how much it is going to cost ‘US'.
In my humble opinion Hawkstone was bang on the money. Pun intended. We got to see some great racing at a great track and a very impressive turnout surely proved that the Hawkstone guys and gals pitched it dead right. And while there's plenty that could be improved upon, I would not want anything changing if it meant a hike in admission in order to pay for it.
Now, World Superbike is a brand that takes itself very seriously, sets itself standards – and the likes of you and me have to pay for these standards, even if we can't always see what we are paying for. And with a gate price of £55 pp, we are clearly expected to pay for a lot.
First things first, Donington put on a good show, a good race programme, good racing and it was a good Sunday's sport. But the crowd was disappointingly small and no doubt we all have our own theories why this was so. That I watched the last race of the day, walked slowly to my car and simply drove out of the field says it all. People have sat there for four or five-hours after a MotoGP. The Donington team know their business and no doubt they will have their own inquest.
But what Donington did have that Hawkstone didn't was an absolutely jam-packed motorcycle park and it holds a lot of bikes. In fact I reckon bikers on bikes made up well over 50 percent of the crowd. Yes, I know, this is what you would expect, the Sunday bikers supporting their own sport, but nevertheless, given the relatively small crowd, the biker presence was way more obvious than ever before.
So what? So why isn't off-road sport doing more to attract the Dad's Army of bikers to its showpiece events?
We all know that there's these Sunday gatherings of road bikers at different places all over the country. The born-again guys and gals get their big hairy bikes out to go for a blast – and the truth is half the time they have no idea where to go. How do I know? Basically because if I didn't have so damned much to do of a weekend I would be one of them! I too have a big shiny, (noisy) bike sat in the garage (a Suzuki TL1000 if anyone is remotely interested) that would need pointing somewhere on a Sunday if I wasn't already going somewhere anyway!
So, we have a ready made audience of spectators looking for somewhere to congregate. I have said before, why not encourage them to off-road events? I am no PR genius but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take a lot to get them to take a look. A ‘bikers' marquee' would be nice for them to gather in, maybe get changed and have a chat. A secure bike/ helmet park even better. Dare I suggest a one-off biker entry fee, a biker raffle? There are several one-make clubs, some have huge memberships, they all want to meet somewhere – we could help them and ourselves at the same time! Bikers are a huge potential audience. Maybe we don't need them!
I was actually pretty impressed with the lack of fripperies on display at Hawkstone. Many teams were getting on with the racing and not ‘wasting' huge sums on what boils down to impressing the team next door. The Superbikes at Donington gave every appearance of living in denial of the world's monetary problems. If the figures really do stack-up and the rows of shiny £200,000 trucks, hospitality units, unfeasably large luxury motorhomes and huge teams of people can be paid-for then good luck to everyone involved. And I really mean that.
But to me, the crowds on Sunday told a different story... the reality is we all need to cut our suits after first checking, very carefully, the length of the cloth! That way, we'll all still be racing this time next year...!