A Letter from the Chair

As we start 2012 I am aware that I have been more than remiss in not providing regular updates on what we have been doing as a club.  Rest assured that your Council has been working extremely hard on your behalf, but, as a wise man once said “You can’t just do the right thing you must be seen to do the right thing!”  So I will try to put more regular bulletins on this website and send them to the regions for inclusion in our newsletters.

2011 was another very successful year for the club with membership still over 2000.  Many thanks go to  Paul Sutcliffe for his Membership Secretary duties.  How we will be affected by the on-going economic climate I am not certain, but we must all do our best to ensure we retain our membership numbers.

My thanks also go to Peter Wilson for continuing the BTCC recruitment campaign and for coordinating the volunteering for taster days.  As you will come to hear, Peter is reducing his involvement in 2012 and we will need to take up any slack so caused.  I hope everyone will help your regional officers in this matter.

Once again we are indebted to Jonathan Palmer for his support and I thank him for his generous contribution of a day out at Bedford Autodrome for the Annual Membership Renewal Prize Draw, the Marshals Trackdays at MSV Circuits and his continued support of all marshals.

Our sponsor initiatives continue to ensure our members can replace their overalls at nominal cost once every three years and we also have replaced on a one-off basis quite a few overalls that have been damaged whilst marshals were carrying out their duties.  We hope to extend this scheme to waterproof clothing and other marshalling items in the near future.

I once again collected a cheque for £1500 from the Kop Hill hillclimb organisers and we made a handsome profit of over £3,000.00 on out sprints at Curborough.  My thanks for these generous contributions and continued support of the Marshals’ Club.  We need these generous sponsors in order to maintain the services we try to provide to you, our members, since the only other income we have is from your subscriptions!

We continue to strongly represent the Club and marshals’ interests at the MSA on Race Committee, the Marshals Working Group, Training Working Group, Volunteer Officials Advisory Panel, ABMRC, Rallies committee, Speed events committee and even the dragster sub-committee.  We continue to lead improvements in the grading scheme where some still think it is our scheme not the MSA’s.

I am very pleased to report the Club still leads with the delivery of training days, not only with our own training days but with Club members delivering training for other clubs.  With the training season approaching I hope you will all benefit from their expertise.  We look forward to the start of the new training season with much more defined agenda for all MSA subsidised days, plus we hope to be at the Autosports and the Race Retro shows.

Finally, my thanks to all the members of Council and their colleagues on the regional committees.  Without their help and support there would be no Club.

As many of you will be aware, I chair the Marshals Working Group (MWG) at the MSA.  This group has representatives from many marshalling organisations and we have the responsibility to represent you with the MSA.  A lot of our work in the last year has been devoted to the changes in the grading scheme.  The scheme belongs to the MSA, not the BMMC, but we do try to influence the development of the scheme to ensure it is fit for purpose.  I have posted separate documents relevant to the scheme on our website that, I hope, will answer all your questions.

If any of you have any questions about the club or marshalling in general, then please e-mail me or give me a call – I and your Council members are here to serve you!

Chris Hobson
National Chairman