Our intent has always been to run hard, competitive, cost-effective, Challenge Events with a friendly atmosphere. We have worked hard over the last six years to get to the stage we are now at and believe we have succeeded in all of those aims. The aspiration for 2013 had been to build on the increased publicity and feedback from 2012 to take the sport forward with some interesting multi day, multi vehicle, multi skill events.

As many of you will be aware we had an unfortunate incident at the Interclub Challenge 2012 that resulted in a claim being made against our insurance. Although the claim in itself is immaterial, considering our Challenge Events are run as non profit making, put on for the benefit of all to enjoy and setup and run by people who give their time for the love of the sport, the fact a claim is being made is very hard to accept. We feel it would be unfair to continue running this type of event in the foreseeable future due to various factors, not least the resultant extra pressure Marshalls are going to feel if they were to continue to show their support. Just the very existence of a claim has meant that the Marshalls involved in the stage where the incident occurred have had a great deal of paperwork to complete.

A secondary factor is the way our sport is progressing, less punch hunt and more stages. Vehicles, teams and equipment are all evolving to meet the challenges we set, in turn vehicles are then developed to overcome these challenges and so the mantel is continually raised. People are pushing themselves harder to achieve results. This all contributes to make it harder for us to setup.

Although we still have the appropriate cover for the first part of 2013 we feel it inappropriate to continue to run Challenge Events when faced with other factors such as; increases in land fees, marshalls availability, some of the main stay competitors moving away from the sport, campsite/car park availability, loss of part of one of our sites coupled with the time needed to setup Challenge Events is increasingly hard to find.

All told, when all these factors are considered together we think the time has come to take a step back from organising and running Challenge Events for the foreseeable future. On the plus side this does give us more time to compete ourselves, concentrate on our Greenlane and Drive Round Days, plus continue our branch out to Driver and Recovery Training.

Happy competing for 2013.