Pre-Season Prep Pays Off
By Wendy Leland
The scene at Summit Point was a familiar one. A group of dedicated volunteers hard at work, spending their day outside, getting sweaty, dirty and thirsty, not to mention sunburned. What makes it different is that it wasn’t even a race weekend! This truly behind-the-scenes event was the MARRC Preseason Work Day on Saturday, March 30.
MARRC operates several vehicles which are all integral to the success of each race weekend. The big school bus which carries our food services equipment is every volunteer’s favorite sight, because whether they come in from track exercises with the Roadracing School or from the turns with the Safety Crew, they know they are about to be treated to an awesome lunch or dinner by our talented MARRC Food Crew. Our big blue truck (nicknamed Road Rash) is used to deliver and pick up the flags, fire bottles, brooms, and cleanup materials needed on each corner station each day, and delivers cleanup materials on scene when there is a significant cleanup to be done. Last but not least, most Summit racers are familiar-some more intimately than others-with our little white pickup trucks (nicknamed Rash Junior) that retrieve bikes and riders who need some, well, let’s be tactful and just say “assistance” to get back to the paddock. Well, it takes MARRC members to take care of all this stuff! Check the tires, change the oil and coolant, recharge and reinstall batteries, make sure the vehicles run, and generally see if anything went kerplooey over the winter. Even the little white trailer that is our Info Booth needs a preseason checkup.
Plus, there is a whole other side to keeping MARRC running. For a volunteer organization we sure do seem to have a lot of paperwork, but it is what keeps us running smoothly at the track. Cornerworker signup forms, Roadracing School schedules and tech inspection forms, information about MARRC for the Info Booth--someone’s got to keep track of all the paper. Other materials need to be stocked, The communications equipment needs to be kept in top-notch order and organized--and someone has to have the patience to replace the 5 AA batteries in all 20 of the scanners! And the Info Booth needs to be inventoried and restocked. There are so many more details that make the Safety Crew and Roadracing School run smoothly, but after years of experience all this preseason work is practically routine. But this year was an additional challenge because we needed to consolidate a lot of different items that had been maintained in different areas into one single storage locker. Dozens of people and several hours later, we now have a single, convenient place where everyone knows what they will find when they open the door! (It may not sound like much, but as someone who usually needs to go in search of “stuff” each race weekend, personally I’m thrilled!)
A great big THANK YOU goes out to all the people who dedicated this gorgeous Saturday to help make sure MARRC would be up to speed by the time the first racebike tire touched the track in April.
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