Club Plates – the new rules

For a couple of years now the Club has been allowing entrée to social members whose sole purpose is to have a conduit whereby they can gain a very cost effective Club Plate licence for their car or cars.

Funny how people soon take advantage of easy-going offerings (border control anyone?) We noticed the rorts begin: one licensed facility was safety checking and approving multiple cars to the same person/s, whose idea was to cheaply register for-sale vehicles so they could be test driven by potential customers on the road. This was stopped by limiting the number of new vehicles per member to two in anyone year.

While there have been no more attempts to milk the system, concern was expressed at a recent Committee meeting that maybe we weren’t be true to ourselves and were straying a bit too far from our roots.

We provide possibly the easiest pathway to Club Plate licensing, but it’s a bit of work for Gordon Cox who runs the scheme for the Club. The money we charge hardly covers admin and postage. Yes, we’re grateful for the funds but… there was a bit of unease about it all.

It’s a service to members of a racing club, which is what we are, but we end up serving people who have no major interest in the club… is this the way we want to go?

Cut to the Calder Fun Day Sprint on February 24th…

The call for volunteers went unheeded when we needed support the most and we were put in the embarrassing position of having to ask members of other clubs to do our marshalling and flag-waving for us – because our own small hard-working team was down on numbers. We now owe the other clubs big time and we are still no closer to having a team of people on hand to run any similar event we might want to put on.

So the Committee has decided that, true to the original compact between VicRoads and the clubs regarding usage of club plates, we will be granting club plate registration and renewal approvals to those who actually take part or put something back into the Club or into motorsport.

What does this mean?

It means that we have a resource that can help the Club and other clubs in their ongoing efforts to serve the membership and the sport we’re all here for. And that resource can help the Club somehow.

So next time you send in your renewal application it would be a good idea to add a post-it note or whatever stating the way in which you have contributed to the common weal.

Here’s what you can do with our Club:
• Flagging, officiating or helping at our events
• Helping out Club people at race meetings
• Contributing to the magazine
• Other stuff you can think of

Here’s what you can do with other clubs:
• As mentioned earlier we owe the MG Car Club for the tremendous help they gave us with our club event at Calder
• Mike Herlihy was our Clerk of Course and is the best person to contact at davidvernall@bigpond.com  The competition director is Ken Price at competitiondirector@mgcc.com.au
• So you could experience the joys of flag marshalling or serving at a race or hillclimb meeting. They have a hillclimb at Rob Roy (great fun) on 28 April and a race meeting at Sandown on May 18-19…

This club works very hard to serve its members. The work is done by only a handful of people and we’re looking to spread the load. There’s an old saying: ‘you only get out of it what you put in to it…’

HTCAV people who put in get a huge amount back in satisfaction, friendship and achievement, but people can burn out and we need back up!