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The WHO Racing Rally-Sprint Proxy Event is still very much in the planning stage, but there will be news soon.

In the meantime, here are our provisional dates for 2021...

   

Click on the image to make it bigger.

If things go to plan, that will give us a full season spread over two years - with our 2020-1 champions crowned in December 2021. If the June Digital Saturday isn't possible, we have a substitute Wednesday pencilled in for 16 June.

Get those dates in your diaries, keep your fingers crossed and please stay safe.

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When we do get back to the Barn, we have these lovely HO scale Goodwood buildings to decorate the track...

   

Graham from GP Miniatures kindly donated them to our club and they arrived this week. What you see are prototypes Graham made a couple of years ago to see the viability of scaling down the 1:32 and 1:43 scale ranges of GP Miniatures building kits to HO. They never made it into production, but these will look utterly fabulous at the Barn!

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With the build-up to the first HO drag race of the Winter Series in full flow (see here), a quick update on plans for the 1/32 Rally-Sprint...

• The event will run from Wednesday 20 January through to Sunday 28 February 2021.
  
• Full coverage will take place here on SlotRacer Online.
  
• The race will be made up of 10-12 stages - mostly 'tarmac' Scalextric Sport track - with cars timed individually over a set number of laps.
  
• The aim is for your car to score the lowest aggregate time over all the stages.
  
• Starting in Brighton, there will be stages in Worthing, Goring and out as far as Barnham, before returning to Brighton for the finale.
  
• Like the HO drag races, you send cars to the start and they are raced by the event hosts – in this case, five different WHO racers – on rally-style ’special stages’ in their homes. For the Barnham stage, a hill climb will be laid on top of part of the South Downs Slot Car Club track.
  
• There are three separate classes – two of them essentially 'box stock' and based on Scalextric rally cars, plus one ‘open’ class running to national Slot Rally UK rules.
  
• Full details will be published next weekend, so you can get cracking preparing some cars!
  
• The entry process will also open next weekend, with a 'sign-up' thread here on SlotRacer Online.
  

Hopefully, we can build on the success of the HO proxy drag racing, have plenty of fun  and have another socially-distant racing format on standby, should we need it again in the future.

   

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Although we have a provisional calendar in place for 2021, it is highly unlikely we will be back at the Barn in April. Our priority remains keeping each other – and the wider community – safe.

The 100% Covid-safe proxy racing will continue...

We’re nearly at the end of our second five-race HO Drag Racing series and planning more events for the rest of the year. If you want to take part – or just follow the action – there are full details about the Winter Series here on SlotRacer Online.

Our 1/32 scale WHO Winter Rally-Sprint has forty-six cars entered by 28 racers, competing across eleven stages hosted by Simon, Oli, Jean and me in our various homes. A big thank you to the hosts for all the time and effort involved! The event runs until early March and you can follow all the coverage here.

Without indulging in too much crystal-ball gazing, there seems a reasonable chance we can get back to the Barn for some racing in the late summer and/or early autumn. We will keep our fingers crossed and begin to prepare by getting the club equipment ready for action.

Next winter will continue to be a concern until the impact of the UK vaccination programme is fully understood. It is likely we will take a 4-5 month break over winter 2021-22. So it would be wise to plan ahead for a re-run of the WHO Winter Rally-Sprint in January/February and more South Coast HO drag racing events every other month.

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The UK government have laid out four steps to end our latest lockdown...

         

Please do note the "no earlier than..." and that all steps are under constant review. If one step is delayed, all subsequent steps are delayed.

To ensure we can all return together - including those who have been shielding - and that the volunteers who run the club are not put under too much pressure, we will not be meeting until Step Four. At this point - no earlier than 21 June - we will look at government guidelines, set some dates, give all our equipment a good clean and test everything is still working...

Our hope has always been to hold our Goodwood Revival digital event in September 2021 - and that seems a real possibility. We have twelve dates booked at the Barn between July and the end of the year - we will use them if we can.

However, there is still a very long way to go. For now, please remember that we are still in lockdown and each of us needs to keep playing our part.

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It's now 52 weeks - one whole year - since we last met and raced at the Barn...

   

During that year, WHO members have been busy...

   

Building cars and tracks at home.

   

Taking part in an online virtual prizegiving.

   

Organising and taking part in ten HO proxy drag racing events.

   

Organising, hosting and taking part in the mammoth eleven stage WHO Winter Rally-Sprint.

   

And we've kept in touch via daily social media posts and sharing some great WHO memories, thanks to the archive of all our events on the WHO website.

   

The Barn is still there - our kit will certainly need a good dust and clean - but we will be back when it's safe for all of us to return together.

In the meantime, I shall be doing some work on the website and gradually getting a few admin jobs sorted. We do have dates booked at the Barn, the club's public liability insurance has been renewed and we have a big bag of WHO medals...

The first thing to do - hopefully late June - will be for a group of us to get into the Barn as a work party and get everything ship-shape. We'll then organise a couple of fun events to blow away the cobwebs and celebrate being back at the Barn.

In the medium term, we will need to stay vigilant and we will need to adjust to a 'new normal', whatever that might be. That may mean the occasional break, particularly next winter. Fingers-crossed that won't be necessary, but we do need to be prepared to keep the club - and everyone involved with it - safe.

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We are now back in a similar situation to the opening post - and everything contained in that post still applies.

There's rightly plenty of excitement about the provisional dates in the government's road map out of lockdown, but an important message seems to have been lost: we'll need strict social distancing for some time to come, if we want to avoid another spike of cases later in the summer and another nasty winter. Typical WHO scenes - like the one above - will not be possible.

That's one difference from last summer - we know the absolute importance of social distancing in containing the virus. The other main difference is the vaccination programme, although very little can be said definitively at the moment - except that there seems to be a drop in the rate of Covid deaths in relation to cases / hospital admissions. It's not very clear how much (if at all) the vaccine will impact on the number of cases or on hospital admissions as the government gradually lifts lockdown restrictions. So far, so good... but there's a long way to go and a huge amount still to learn.

What does this mean for us returning to the Barn? It pretty much means what was outlined in the first few posts of this thread. A long list of requirements and restrictions that - as a club - we decided was not something we wanted to do last year. We made a collective decision to wait until we could all return together safely and as normally as possible - and no unreasonable demands (or risks) were placed on the team of volunteers that run the club.

We would not even begin to consider meeting until the final step of the road map - the earliest date being 21 June. That's because we are not treating the club as a commercial business (eg restaurant, cinema, sports venue etc), but as 'social contact' of mostly unrelated individuals, meeting and interacting indoors.

Even after the country reaches that final step, strict social distancing will be continue to be needed. That means the 2-metre (six foot) rule, face masks indoors, no shared equipment, regular handwashing, regular disinfection of surfaces, a limited period of time spent together etc. Of course, anyone with any symptoms of Covid or has been contacted by test & trace will be expected to self isolate and stay away from the Barn for the specified period of time. On-the-door temperature testing, mobile phone 'check-in' and vaccine passports may be requirements or recommendations.

What we'll need to do as a club over the next 2-3 months is to decide again whether we want to try and get back to the Barn before it is safe for all of us to return together. If we do decide to modify last summer's decision, we'll need to look at how we do this as safely and thoroughly as possible - and acknowledge that there will be some key members of the club organising team who are under medical advice not to engage in club-type activities until the pandemic is "over" (This autumn? Next year? 2023?).

Technically, it's absolutely possible. Whether we want to is another thing. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. Alternatives remain the 100% Covid-safe proxy events and the small-group 'ad hoc' home racing that will inevitably happen informally over the summer. The latter are not official club events, but they are a way of WHO racers having some fun and taking individual responsibility for any risk.

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The May 2021 WHO Newsletter has just been sent out. This is most of what's in it...

Back to the Barn? The prospects of getting back to the Barn are certainly looking much brighter! However, it is still relatively early days and we need to be patient. Lifting lockdown is all about the ‘bigger picture’ – the overall infection rates, getting children back to school and the economy back on its feet. But the virus is still here and – especially for those of us who are more vulnerable – the personal risks remain, even with the vaccine roll-out.

Last year, we decided not to return until a WHO night would be almost entirely restriction-free and only when all of us could safely return together. That is what we will do this time – we won’t be rushing back. We have something very special at WHO that I don’t want to put at risk. The past year has been tough – particularly for those who have been ill and those who have lost loved ones, whether from Covid or something else. Returning to the Barn together and enjoying each others’ company will be part of putting the pandemic behind us – but that won’t happen quite yet.

Preparation… Simon and I will be looking in at the Barn this month and will start the process of checking, cleaning and sort the equipment there. We have a bag of HO controllers to make sure no-one will need to share and are planning some upgrades to modernise race control at both our HO and WHO/digital events. Mike D has done an utterly fabulous job updating the digital club car fleet during lockdown and is tweaking the track and equipment he has at his home.

In the meantime… We can’t put an exact date on when we will return, so we do need to be patient. There are Covid-safe racing alternatives including the HO proxy drag races, various 1/32 scale proxy events and Gareth’s fabulous ‘Limit of Adhesion’ i-Racing group. Many of us have been having slot car fun at home and I am sure there will be plenty of home racing happening this summer. Perhaps outdoors?

Outdoor events are much safer. There are regular outdoor Toy & Train Fairs just up the A24 at Ashington and over at Ardingly near Haywards Heath. These take place on Sunday mornings. Local retailer Weevils Slot Cars are there with new and used cars, sets and accessories – and there are often other second-hand cars for sale on other people’s tables. Perhaps some of us can meet up there for some retail therapy and a catch-up over the summer? I intend to be at as many as possible. Keep an eye on the WHO Facebook page. A list of events can be found here: https://www.modeltoyauctions.co.uk/news/...838269BB6/

2022 WHO Winter Rally-Sprint. Whether we are racing at the Barn or taking a brief winter break, the second WHO Rally-Sprint proxy event will be held next January and February. If you’re interested in hosting a stage – or helping with one – do let me know asap. The plan is to publish rules & regs for entrants towards the end of the summer. To get a flavour, there’s a short report of the 2021 event on the Jadlam blog: https://blog.jadlamracingmodels.com/2021...ly-sprint/

We're getting closer, but...

   

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We don't have a firm date for a return to the Barn and - at the moment - I wouldn't even like to narrow it down to a specific month... but we are beginning to prepare.

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be sharing some of the ongoing preparations on the WHO Facebook page - including some of the changes we're making to the club kit, what differences racers can expect at a WHO night and what we all need to do to prepare. Some of those are included in this poster...

   

To be able to return safely, we will expect most - if not all - of the social distancing regulations to be 'paused' by the government. However - because we want vulnerable people to feel as safe as possible at the Barn - we will be asking racers to wear a mask and practice good hand hygiene. So a mask and a bottle of sanitizer should be an essential part of your WHO and WHO/digital kit when we return...

   

There are some cool masks out there... so lets see what you've got

We do ask that bringing sanitizer is your responsibility. The kitchen will be open only to use the hand basin - and there are basins in each of the three toilets with soap and hot water. So there's no excuse not to keep those hands nice and clean!

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Simon and I arranged an official visit the Barn yesterday evening. It all looked (and smelt) good inside - apart from when we opened the cupboard, which was rather musty...

       

The WHO kit seems to have survived the 14 months. Having said that, the tin of tea, coffee, sugar and biscuits will be going in the bin.

We've taken almost everything out of the cupboard to clean, evaluate, repair or replace. So there's only the HO track, two hdmi monitors, cables, bridges and mdf store remaining for now...

       

A lot of what we've taken away won't be coming back - so we'll have only what we need.

The plan is to put together a small working party in the next 4-6 weeks to spend a Wednesday evening at the Barn to clean and test the HO track. We'll then need to hold an evening or two to test any new systems and to trial our Covid-safe layout for the Barn. Essentially we'll be turning our usual space ninety degrees, so the hang-out spaces will be in the inner courtyard and outside the front door - rather than the usual 'dead-air' zones at either end of the hall. Plus we'll aim to place the track, drivers, marshals and race control as close as possible to the breeze between the two doors.

As for a date to start racing... we really need to see how the scientific advice and government guidelines develop during the next two months. That will be crucial to decide when it's safe for us all to return together.