Originally Posted by
TryHard
Disagree... It has long been the exact way the BRCA votes. Racers understand that on their head be it decisions are made. Hence a few years ago the dropping of the mod class... lo and behold next year it was back when they realised it was a bad idea. Clubs are removed from that process, quite simply as it is too clunky, limited catchement, and racers often feel put out when a club votes a different opinion too themselves.
Give the racers the option to make the decisions, and you'll get a fairer reflection of what people actually want. How many actually on a club committee at the moment actually, hand on heart, know what the guys running at their clubs would like to race?
I know you'll come back that clubs should hold votes on the topics at hand, but truthfully... I've not once yet been consulted by any club committee member on any Arrcmacc votes, and there's your flaw in the system right there. Personally, I would be all for a constitutional change on this matter.
If you haven't been consulted by your club committee then that is a failure of your club, not of AARCMCC.
The procedure followed at Maitland was that all AARCMCC proposals were posted on the club website, and members invited to call or write to the committee to express their view. The amount of feedback we got depended upon how interesting the rule change was to the racing population.
An example of how the populist position doesn't work was when discussing dropping the weight limit in TC. Every submission we got but one (and we got more than a dozen of them), basically read, "I can/can't make my car lighter, so I vote yes/no." Only one person was the least bit concerned about the potential future ramifications for the sport.
Do you think that if the BRCA didn't have decisions made by populist racer vote that they would have dropped Mod? Clearly it was a terrible decision, disastrous for the UK at Euro and Worlds level, anyone in the sport for a significant length of time could have told you that up front. Instead, racers in the UK had to learn the hard way.
Thing is, at any given time, half the people in this sport are brand new. You give them the opportunity to influence the big decisions by voting on their phone without serving an apprenticeship, and you're opening the sport up to more of these ill-informed calls.
The number of times I've seen people newer to RC administration make suggestions that have been tried and failed is astonishing. They make these suggestions with no knowledge of how things have worked in the past, why they've worked or why they haven't. After spending a few years in committee positions they begin to learn because the others around them are able to communicate these things over time.
It's up to individual clubs how they make decisions, but the best calls IMO are made by smaller groups of people who've taken the time to investigate the ramifications of a proposal. These things can't be thrashed out in 5 minutes at a drivers' meeting.