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Paul, in his blog on environmental mats, has cleverly stirred up valid concerns for how we are or are not following the rules, regulations and codes laid down in the ACU Handbook. As a licensed motocross clerk of the course, running just one event a year, for this annual occasion I have to be well conversed with the contents of the Handbook, or at least know how to navigate it. But to pretend I have every detailed rule at the ready to throw at anyone in contravention of it would be silly, and I doubt even Dennis Slaughter MBE would claim this ability. The theme that runs through the Handbook is that the Clerk of the Course is the person responsible for everything and everyone connected with the event. This includes environmental, safety and medical matters. Thus, a C of C must be someone who is capable of seeing the big picture, applying common sense and making judgements, many of which in the heat of the moment will in hindsight be wrong. All his technical and other specialist officers can and must advise, but the C of C has the final say.

We are all indebted to the hundreds of volunteer Centre officials who have developed their specialist roles to licensed competence. Sadly, but inevitably, many officers lose sight of common sense and the wider point when they become so tangled up with what the book says – or what they interpret it to say – that they succeed in alarming everyone, be they riders, organisers or even ACU managers themselves. The Handbook itself isn’t flawless either. One example is section 7.7, Sound Level Control. Falling under “Technical Control” it states that “all machines shall be sound tested using the 2 Metre Max method…..”. Taken literally, this is a requirement that cannot in practice be undertaken at an event. My guess is that this laboratory-type test, detailed on page 85 of the Handbook, would take a trained sound inspector at least 5 minutes per machine to set up. For a 150 rider entry, that’s over 12 hours of testing, which would mean that racing would have to be postponed for another day! Thank goodness the C of C is given the responsibility to decide what is sensible, and be deemed to have the good sense to not get carried away by unrealistic regulatory demands on him! In any case, we can all judge an over-noisy bike on race day without all the paraphernalia of independent sound measuring procedures.

And so to Paul’s environmental mats! Most of us can ignore the FIM regulations he quotes – unless it is an international, we run under the jurisdiction of the ACU. The fact that the ACU Environmental Code has specified for the last 2 years mat thickness as 5cm (2”) minimum is some indication of how much of the Handbook should be taken literally, and how much attention our governing body is paying to such nonsense . This code of practice is a guide. Cs of C are advised to “respect” its contents, not carry it out to the letter. We all know that putting down a piece of old carpet, polythene sheet, old rag or whatever would protect the ground from any damage likely to otherwise occur from the spillage of a litre of oil, if not quickly mopped up by the operator as would in practice occur. In my own professional experience of environmental management matters, any Environmental Officer unlikely to be looking underneath bikes in the pits on his day off would be highly impressed to see ANYTHING being used for spill protection. Everything has to be kept in proper perspective. Nothing we do in our sport can be compared to an oil tanker running aground. If environmental agencies and landowners considered that allowing vehicles to park and bikes to race on agricultural land carried a great risk requiring the use of approved mats for catching oil spills, then off road motorcycle sport would have vanished by now.

My message is therefore to be realistic about our regulations and codes and not to alarm riders and organisers to the point where they are driven away from the sport. By all means steadily develop a responsible culture for the care of the environment, safety and so on but let’s not raise petty regulations to a prominence they don’t justify in the real world of our sport. Rules have their place in settling disputes and clarifying best practice but common wisdom is the overriding requirement – that’s why the world is best governed by elected politicians and not “experts”!

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