Future of team racing

From John Paul PERRET    

I just come back at home after some quite days far from thecircles and I read all these strange messages about TR during the last WC in Landres.

I saw two kinds of races: Races with pilots often competing high level TR events, and races with inexperienced pilots flying such competitions once or twice a year. The first are in the beginning of the results sheet the second in the last part.

I saw that the semi finalists are teams with young (or not so old) pilots. And I can see that they are sportsmen or they were able to compensate their ages by a long experience and a lot of training ( Volodia Titov, Joseph Ficher, for example).

Team Racing is a sport and need sportsmen in the centre. I saw also that a lot of semi finalists and the three finalists were the builders of their models and not only modellers who bought their models some months or some days before the competition. So they had time to work with their own models. In Team Racing the best and the most expensive model ( even if we have enough dollars to buy it) is nothing if you fly only once or twice a year with it. I saw that the teams are often the same in some countries since a very long time. Did you know that the team Andreev Sobko was not in the regular national team of Russia. They achieved only 4th of the selection and didn't have their ticket to Landres.

Hopefully for them, they were reigning World Champions. Did you know that the Surugue Brothers were only 4th in the French selection and that they came in the French team after the withdrawal of the 3rd team to give them the place. Did you know the system of selection of the British team or of the Ukrainian team? It is difficult to enter in these national teams and it needs work, training and a lot of competitions.

I saw that the three first nations ( France, Russia and Ukraine ) had juniors ( even if Ukrainians juniors were not selected, their performances being not enough good to come in France - They were Junior WC in 1998).

At least, I am sure that the problem of Canada, USA or some other countries is only in the lack of relief and that the effort to do by the existing team is to create and to help new teams . After that the problem of the future of team racing will clearer.

Derek organised a meeting with the title THE FUTURE of TEAM RACING. I think now that the best title for a such meeting was OUR OWN FUTURE in TEAM RACING. The only problem was: how to survive ( ourself ) Just after the 99 EC I wrote on the net - I wrote not very often - that the French approach of team-racing seemed to be not so bad, that we had to work with and for the youth to have all together good results. To day I am sure to be right. Let us begin to do something for the young modellers , Trying to change the rules for safety will be certainly useful but changing the rules to keep at all costs old inexperienced teams in the circuit will be the worst thing to do for the future of team racing.

I promise to take time to write more of my passion : Team Racing......... ( not slow Team Racing) Jean Paul PERRET