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Starting a New Touring Car Club. How I did it and why.

I live in Norwich, Norfolk and there isn't a huge amount of R/C clubs about for people to race at. In Norwich there is only one club and...

I live in Norwich, Norfolk and there isn't a huge amount of R/C clubs about for people to race at. In Norwich there is only one club and the next closest is 26miles away.

I raced at the other club, but after a while I soon started to realise that their was definitely an appetite from myself and other racers alike and for more avenues to enjoy the RC hobby in the Norwich area.

People are after a club with a surface that can allow drivers to use more conventional indoor set-ups (The other club has unique driving surface where conventional rubber slicks dont work). This would also allow local drivers to really nurture their skills on a club level which can then be transferred to regional or national events.

Also I was keen for it to have a committee of racers running the club, this would allow all of the club members to contribute to how it would be run, keeping it open to more change than a club where only one person is in charge.

So with this in mind I decided that Norwich needed a new R/C club.

The first thing I did was speak to friends who race to see if they would want to be part of a committee to help run the club. I ended up with a committee of 4 people including myself which is ideal.

With a committee in place we met up to discuss whether we thought another club in Norwich could work. We looked at the number of people who raced at the current club in Norwich and other people we knew who wanted to race but not at the current club and decided that aslong as we could find a hall that was big enough but not really expensive then we could make it work.

Next we started searching for a hall. It had to be big enough for a decent track (20mx10m) well lit, have good access, easy to find and central. After a couple of months of phone calls, emails and visits to many halls we found one, 25mx12m hall space, parking, central, very nicely lit, all automatic doors so anyone could come and not too expensive.


So the hall was sorted, onto the next problem.

This is where things started to get serious/expensive. We decided that if we wanted this club to be successful we needed to be racing on Primatrack GT racing carpet like the majority on Touring car clubs in the UK. We rang the company that sells this carpet in the UK and discovered that its very expensive (£388 + vat per roll and we need 4 rolls) With this in mind we decided that we would have to buy second hand carpet to begin with and the save for new carpet once the club was running successfully. So lots of emails and forum searching began. We found some ideal carpet but got let down twice. It all felt like it was falling apart after the second time of failure but finally we found some, exactly the right amount for our track. Between the 4 of us we collected the money to pay for the carpet, hired a van and i had a delightful 5hour each way drive to collect it.
Primatrack GT sample

Carpet safely back at the hall we needed a way of running the meetings/counting laps etc. AMB timing systems are by far the most common and we knew they work well so we started to look for one. A new system is £3400 so a new one was not going to happen. I was chatting with a friend who used to run another  club 30miles away from Norwich about what we were doing and he said that he still had his AMB20 timing system, these systems are old and can only work with handout transponders but that isnt a problem. He said we could have it! This was a massive result as we were worried about how we were going to afford timing equipment.  Most clubs use BBK timing software but i have never been keen on this so i looked about on the internet and found Laps Free, i tried it and loved it so we will be using this.


We now had the main things we needed to race and this left a few small things to collect before we announced what we had been working on. The track markings, laptop and printer have all been aquired so we were ready to go. 


The only thing missing now was racers to come to our club. The best way we have found to promote the club is Facebook. So a facebook page and web page have been created

https://www.facebook.com/pages/EARCC-Norwich/5029794364...
http://earccnorwich.wix.com/earcc


We have now set a date for our first meeting which is June 30th, so fingers crosses it all goes to plan. I will update on how things are going after.
Racing 179932925606187486

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