We all know the organisers have no control over the catering. I could have paid £10 to get into the trackside cafe, but I wasnt interested in the racing. Catering does seem to be a recurring downside, as it is at most events of this type. Id love to come up with some constructive criticism that didnt sound like Im disrepecting the organisers, but I don’t know what the answer is. Im just gratefulthat people are willing to give up their time for the sake of the club and enjoyment of its members.
I actually much prefer the rallies where you can get away from the cars and traders for a while, and go back later, which is why I loved Sandringham. I felt a little hemmed in at Donnington.
Breakfast in the hotel at 6.30am, on site from about 7.30am, rushing around all day long, who has time to eat? But I will say a big thank you to the nice lady from Sandicliffe Mazda who provided James (Mister H) and me with a couple of very nice cups of tea and a shortbread biscuit…
Did nobody see the sweet stalls? I had a delightful bag of peanut brittle that kept me going!
Yes, the catering was unexpectedly poor but if the club had no control over it then I guess there’s not much else that could be done. Paying extra to get into the main circuit just to buy food seems somewhat self-defeating. I’d agree best to avoid Donington in future. However, it does seem that for future events catering is something that needs to be addressed and maybe look to find caterers that do more than just bacon rolls and burgers. There must be some that do sandwiches or other hot food? That said, I think next time I will take my own food and drinks.
Overall though it was a much better rally which made up for the very poor event at Wentworth in the spring. I know you can’t please everyone all the time so you have to take the bad with the good. A thankless task for the organisers but really appreciate the time and effort put in.
Not sure who you heard that from. I can see a grain of truth in it so I can see how the confusion may come about. But that’s not strictly true. Donington charged us by the space we used. So yes you could say that every ‘stand’ came with a cost. But the reality is a little different. Every square meter came at a price. So that includes the main arena, the public car park, the launchpad building… The list goes on… As usual and as I am sure you would expect all of our excellent MX5 traders paid for their pitches.
The reality of the situation is that any club would simply not have the budget to put on such an amazing event at such a prestigious venue and then give away trading spaces for free. Our valued traders pay a reasonable market price to attend such a prestigious event. That’s how any event of this type works. We’ve outgrown the cheaper, less scary, event options.
Autojumble pitches were quite reasonably priced at £12 per pitch. So that might be where you go that figure from? But, did you see the huge pitches that bought? Quite impressive. Compare that to the price of a very small autojumble pitch at say the NEC, any other large car event, or even your local car boot sale. Cheap as chips! Everyone that had an autojumble pitch, that I spoke to, covered their £12 in the first hour. I know of at least one autojumbler who managed to sell goods to a value of a reasonably sized three figure sum.
Constructive criticism is how we learn and improve. You are right, we do have a struggle at our events to convince venues and catering vendors that the event will be genuinely HUGE. Thankfully we can now present a growing ‘portfolio’ of previous events and that should help us to get the right caterers in place in future.
Speaking of the future, next year we will be ‘back’ at Gaydon. Except of course, they have rebuilt Gaydon so it will actually be like a whole new venue! BUT we get to deal with the same venue management team that we dealt with in 2014. So when we say 2000 cars, they will believe us. Sneaky huh
Only used the catering for an ice cream and later on a drink. Queues were reasonable when we used them so no complaints here.
Only slight negative we had with the venue (and apologies for being off topic) was the unevenness of the roadways in the car park - Donington should have graded these to remove the potholes before hundreds of low slung sports cars turned up…
But didn’t detract the day at all, which we thought was superbly organised with lots to do.
I enjoyed the event hugely and liked the choice of venue which meant I could go and watch the racing and pop in and out of the show between races and during their lunch hour. The catering issue did not affect me as I used the track restaurant for lunch, however the queues I saw for the show catering were large at times as others have said. For me the show only usually has enough to keep me interested for 4 hours or so and with a 2 and a half hour drive each way I wanted to have stuff of interest for a whole day out which the racing helped provide. I would definitely like to see future events like this where there is other stuff to see besides the show itself. I’d have loved to have made it to the donington F1 museum too, but didn’t have enough time to do it all, but this is preferable to seeing everything I want to see in only a half day.
Only down side on the racing was that the mx5 races in the afternoon were at the end of the day, but these schedules are put in place well before the organisers would have known an mx5 event was running alongside I’d imagine. £5 for the racing was a bargain.
I thought the rally at donington was a vast improvement over some of the others and for it to be on a hard stand after the rain that we had on the saturday was a releif. Was disapointed by the lack of catering but after reading the comments I now realise that this wasnt in your control, (did make me chuckle seeing the 6 chuck waggons behind the fence in the display area). One thought we had, more seating areas might be useful. You have several members that find mobility difficult and with the amount of space there was perhaps a few more table and chairs might have been an idea. The retail village was a good idea and hopefully that can be expanded a bit more?
