Minis removed from F1 dates at King's Lynn in 2016

Following discussions with the National MiniStox Club (NMSC) it has been decided to drop fixtures for this formula from F1 meetings at King’s Lynn for the remainder of 2016 whilst arrangements can hopefully be made for the formula to be accommodated at events which will keep members of the club happy in 2017.

Due to number of races and pit space together with the need to often remove the build up of shale from the fence at the request of drivers at F1 meetings, we were only able to offer the NMSC 3 races at F1 meetings during 2016. This was accepted by the club but despite this condition being in place at several meetings last year which saw the meetings run with full points, this year the NMSC decided to make these events none points scoring ones.

This has not proved popular with drivers and whilst each King’s Lynn meeting can accommodate 28 MiniStox the last meeting for the formula saw a number of drivers book in and not cancel their bookings with only 14 drivers racing at the event which had 25 drivers booked in to race a couple of days earlier and saw us expecting 21 cars to race still at start time.

We were very disappointed with this. The committee have informed us that they are expecting well under 20 cars to race at the next meeting so a joint decision was made to take Minis of this meeting as this number of cars does not generally produce the type of racing our fans want to see and also does not represent the formula well.

We cannot wait until two weeks before every fixture before finding out if enough minis will want to race at dates so a joint decision was made to take off the remaining MiniStox fixtures which allows the NMSC to find alternative tracks to fill in any gaps in the fixture list rather than drivers who want to race having weekends with no racing and allows us to source a replacement formula for these dates.

One of the dates the minis have lost at King’s Lynn is on Saturday 24 September. There is currently no other racing for the club that weekend and we have offered the club the chance to race on Sunday 25 September with unrestricted bookings when we have a domestic meeting which we are currently awaiting a reply on.

Should the NMSC decide to race at that meeting then they will only be losing three King’s Lynn dates in 2016 so there is not a drastic amount of fixtures being cut.

We will endeavour to find dates in 2017 for the minis where we can run more than three races for the formula but this is unlikely to be on F1 meetings.