Racewars has officially cancelled its interim 2022 event scheduled to be held at the Perth Motorplex on February 25th to 27th 2022.
Organisers had made a call on 3rd December that if the entry numbers were not high enough to make the event viable to run by 16th December, they would not run it.
Today the announcement was made.
“In line with our post on December 3rd Racewars confirms that the event scheduled for February 25th – 27th at The Perth Motorplex has been canceled. Entry fees will be refunded.
Racewars also wishes to advise followers that there are currently no plans for future events.
This extends to & includes the Albany Runway Racing event which we have been informed is unable to proceed. This is due to significant issues with the runways surface condition & the councils need to protect the runway from anything that could further damage its surface. We support their call given the condition of the runway & how vital it is to keep it safely active for aircraft until such time as it can be repaired & rebuilt whenever that may be.
We wish to thank you all for your support over the years. A special thank you needs to go to The City of Albany along with those in the community that welcomed us & supported us since our move to The Great Southern. We’d also like to thank the ANDRA & Motorplex teams for working with us on what we believe would have been a great weekend of social motorsport & car culture had it proceeded.
For now we’re going to look back on all we’ve achieved, from practically nothing & absolutely out of nowhere.
We’ve taken Racewars from an idea hatched over a beer in a Mt Lawley pub to an event that had global reach & redefined runway racing in Australia. While the wider recognition of the diversity & quality that exists in the WA car scene and other achievements like the Racewars Sprint were important to us, we still feel our biggest success was reaching out to true grassroots racers. We did this by delivering events that supported car culture & our enthusiast community on our terms, our way; for us. From all of us at Racewars; thanks for being part of this journey.”
The usual Racewars format was not possible to run in 2022 in Albany, Western Australia due to works to repair the surface of the Albany Airport where the event was traditionally held.
After a lay off for 2021 due to COVID-19, the organisers thought an interim event would give West Australian fans of the event something to wet their appetite until the return of the full format.
It would appear they were wrong, despite many screaming for events like this in online platforms such as Facebook.
The event was never meant as a replacement of Racewars. 1/8th and 1/4 mile drag racing, 1520ft Roll Racing was on the schedule for as many hours possible across the three days. A car show with Kebabs & Cars along with a Skid Row running again for as many hours as possible over the weekend.
When the rules and regulations around the event were released, many complaints surfaced on social media about cars that would “easily go over those restrictions and we’d have to sit out the whole weekend”. Racewars moved quickly to assure that there were options if the restrictions were broken to continue to compete and that the format was based of other events that ran well with similar competitors.
THE DECEMBER 3rD SATEMENT
“It appears we might have got this a bit wrong… We pride ourselves on delivering events for the community that engage & entertain the community. It seems however that our proposed Motorplex event isn’t resonating with many of you and has left most of you cold on the concept.
We knew that some of you would only want to go runway racing. We now know many of you still have negative outlooks about the Motorplex the way things have run there in the past. We can see all this is having an impact on people commiting to the event. After speaking to many of you and hearing what you have to say we understand where you’re coming from & while we feel many of you are missing the point & over thinking things; we know that there’s only so much we can say to some of you as minds have been made up and that’s that.
Importantly we know there’s still a number of you who are still open minded & giving it some ongoing consideration. We really do believe this has the potential to be a great weekend of minimal stress, no BS car culture with the bonus of weekend long race track access. However we also don’t believe in making the same mistakes we have made with the runway event.
We will not be proceeding with the event unless it has a genuine pathway to cover it’s costs without needing funding from the event team to support it. This means that without sign up’s we won’t take the risk to proceed.
On December 16th a decision will be made to proceed or not. Should sufficient people make the choice to join us we’ll gladly proceed, if not we’ll refund those who signed up & committed to joining us in trying to deliver this event for the community.
What happens next is collectively your call.
There’s no hard feelings if you all collectively decide it’s not for you. That’s your choice & we’ll respect that. So we’ll look forward to seeing what you decide to do & we’ll go from there.”
It would appear that collectively, the West Australian car scene has said no.
RIP Racewars.
