race going nowhere

it's getting to the stage where i need a break from my weekends. again! which isn't to say i wasn't doing some interesting stuff. i had a media workshop in auckland, community radio open day back in hamilton, shama board meeting, and a couple of other of things on, all of which were very fruitful. but it's a worry when i don't get time to do the grocery shopping!

and i'm definitely over the v8s. well i was over them the first year they came to hamilton, mostly because i'm not into car racing at all, and the disruption the event causes to my route to work for at least 6 weeks is really quite annoying. but still, i could see that they might have some wider economic benefits to the city, which balanced that out a bit.

but, once the first race was over, it turned out that the economic benefits weren't particularly wide spread. a few businesses did well, but most didn't get any upturn in custom and ended up losing money because they had bought so much extra stock for customers who never turned up.

a couple of years on and the organisers have been basically begging people to buy tickets to avoid substantial losses. this is a worry, mostly because our city council entered into some kind of agreement to bring the v8s here. the details of said agreement were never disclosed - commercial sensitivity being the excuse. now i'm going to be really annoyed if the city council is losing money on our behalf because of this event, which we may be having to fund through our rates. but of course i'll never know. i wonder if i could do an OIA request to the council.

if there is no economic benefit arising from this event, then i frankly can't see the point of it. there are no other benefits that aren't vastly outweighed by the costs. and i'm sick of the waikato times running front page "stories" (free adverts, rather) for grid girls. i've yet to see any times stories (front page or otherwise) about women drivers or organisers/managers. nope, the only female participation worth mentioning is being eye-candy for the boys.

yup, definitely over the v8s.