The V8’s have come and gone and everything gets back to “normal”.

On behalf of everyone I want to say Thank You to the drivers who came and helped us out and to everyone else “Well Done” for all your efforts to make the whole weekend a success. We had tried to allocate you all to points where you could get the benefit of a different view of all the racing but it’s very difficult not being able to give anyone a break or a lunch-time move so we had to do the best we could.

It was also necessary to put experienced people in certain points that we knew had the capability of being able to teach the Young Officials just what we did, how we did it and why. I’m sorry if anyone thought that we had given any special treatment in our placements but the way we did it has proved that we did a good job as we’ve picked up a number of new members.

The CAMS Young Officials program seems to have been a great success, so all kudos to Doug and Tracey for all their efforts and the seriously high number of K’s they had to walk. From our perspective the reports that I have had back from the senior officials in 1, 9, 10 & 11 over the 3 days who had a number of these YO’s with them, is that the YO’s were asking the right questions, showed a great deal of enthusiasm for what we do and a number were keen to take this further by either signing up as members or staying on in the afternoon to get more experience.

I think we all got a great deal of enjoyment from watching the different categories racing and it was good to get the Aussie cars over here finally as they provided some interesting racing. The V8 Utes did their best to make sure no one went away without at least one bent panel and they all performed as we’d come to expect, hard, fast and furious. Hats off to our local drivers in the Super GT’s and Historic Touring cars who gave us a great display of fast driving, OK there were a few incidents but after all that’s motor racing.

The V8’s themselves certainly didn’t disappoint, with practice, qualifying and the actual races showing that every driver certainly earn their pay. 160k+ 2 wide through the esses with 20 other cars sitting centimetres off each other’s bumpers and no one touches, is testament in itself. It was GREAT to have Volvo record their first win here in the West and good to see that a number of different manufacturers were on the podium at the end of all 3 races.

We all have to say a special Thank You to Pete Morley for staring our days with a good breakfast… OK I know they did it down at McCracken House, but there is always something a bit extra about Pete’s egg and bacon sarnies.

I would like to say Thank You to Jan Jenzen for all her hard work and putting up with me nagging her for passes for the extra Flaggies, to Jackie and Debbie for making sure we all had plenty of food and drink and the all the organising people, the office staff and sundry helpers of the WASCC for putting on an excellent weekend.

Let us move on and make the rest of the year a success as far as our participation in the sport is concerned. Let’s keep our number up, encourage the new young members with guidance and mentoring and make 2014 a good year for all of us.