The chairman of club of the year Anglia Motor Sport Club explains how it is getting new people involved at the grassroots
Anglia Motor Sport Club was established in 2013 to combat the decline in grassroots motorsport. Three individuals from three clubs – the Sporting Car Club of Norfolk, the Eastern Counties Motor Club and the West Suffolk Motorsport Club – came together and decided that they couldn’t do things on their own and collectively they could make a difference.
They formed AMSC as an umbrella club and other clubs in the area realised they also couldn’t do what they needed by themselves. We’ve now got 12 member clubs from the East Anglia region with some more clubs looking to join imminently.
Collectively we can put on some fantastic events. We organise anything from 12-car road rallies to production car trials right through to this month we ran a stage rally, the Circuit Rally Championship round at Snetterton.
Things like the stage rally we’d never be able to do as individual clubs, unfortunately the numbers of people are not there within the clubs these days. So collectively we can put on things like the stage rally and even some of the bigger Targas we do.
We get a lot of interest in our events, plus the StreetCar initiative that Motorsport UK has launched is really helping bolster what we’re doing within the grassroots. AMSC was one of StreetCar’s first approved clubs. We could see that’s where the future is and if we don’t get the StreetCar people in and the youngsters in there’s no future in the sport.
AMSC has got a couple of specific initiatives to try and make motorsport more inclusive and accessible. We’ve got Better Together that has been running for quite a while now and has really bolstered the inclusivity of the sport and that it’s accessible to all.
It’s off the back of Women In Grassroots Motorsport that our club development officer Laura Cooledge was involved in, which looked at female under-representation in motorsport and sought to create change, and Better Together has taken it to the next level.
Better Together has come up with a set of rules of how to relate to and treat people within motorsport. We’re now looking at taking to it the next stage and working on how to push it forward.
And the other initiative we’ve got is
Get into Motorsport that seeks to make participation in motorsport – regardless of the role or discipline – as easy as possible. While StreetCar’s encouraging people to come out and drive, Get into Motorsport is encouraging all aspects of involvement, so that’s also getting involved in organising and coming out to marshal.
Unfortunately if we don’t get more organisers in we aren’t going to have the people there to run the events that people want to do. There’s always going to be competitors out there, unfortunately there’s not necessarily going to be organisers, so that’s AMSC’s next step to really drive home the training and opportunities that are available within motorsport on the volunteering side.
We certainly encourage the use of shadowing of officials. That’s how I got into clerking: I’ve shadowed in the past and then come through to actually clerk events myself now.
We’ve definitely seen a difference in participation through our work. Through
Get into Motorsport we ran an initiative at the beginning of March last year and we saw people come to an evening where they never thought they’d be able to compete, they’ve come out with families and they’ve taken part in treasure hunts and all sorts of things like that which are just great to see, because there is always something for everybody within motorsport.
There’s so many examples of new people participating, loads of families we’ve got involved, it’s great to see everybody just coming out.
Winning Motorsport UK club of the year for 2022 meant so much to us. It really proves that we are going in the right direction and that the 10 years have really been worth it.
Motorsport UK knows what we do, but we never really anticipated we’d win club of the year because there’s also a lot of other clubs that do great work. It’s just really great to have been recognised for the initiatives we’ve done and the hard work that’s gone in over the years and working collectively we can achieve a lot.
Winning the award has had a really good impact, and we’ve had other clubs come to us and say ‘look what are you doing? It’s obviously working’ to mirror what we do to make motorsport accessible in all parts of the country.