Hacketts Lake 2013 News Update

Midlands Branch welcomes all our friends back to Hackett’s Lake for the third year from Thursday the 23rd May when the site opens up for setting out, a planned media morning on the 24th, your chance to show off your craft and have your own famous five minutes.
Those who are able to take time out to help setting up are welcome to come along and camp on site anytime from Thursday afternoon.
Main set up of the course, paddock etc will be PM Friday – please try to help from 13.00 if you can make it.
There will be no camping fee for Thursday night or daytime Friday.

There is a sensibly priced bar planned and a live group Sat night on the J A Stephens Stage.

At the end of racing on Saturday, there will be a youngsters hovverin at the wall of death section of the circuit where family members and others can use/borrow cadet type craft and try a little water crossing. There will be marshalling and a rescue boat on hand.

Onto racing starting with the 2 day European event on the 25th and 26th and a third day for the 3 day second round of the British Championships.

Point scoring will work with entrants scoring in both the European event and the British Championship on days 1 and 2 with accumulated points carried on to day 3.

There will be some slight juggling of programme with days 1 and 2 following European programme with an Open round tagged on the end of each set of races. F3 will be combined with FS races and F35 is probably going to be tagged onto the Novices race.

There is a course change this year to make a larger grid and paddock, which happily also brings the grid and pits much closer to the public with a starting grid similar to Rother Valley so the public can be right next to the starting gate.

There is also another important change – the lake is owned by two parties with a boundary strangely staggered across the lake. The previous owners of the other half of the lake (Tarmac) had no problems with our use of the water, but this was sold late last year at auction to the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust.

Keith Rhodes has of course been in negotiations with the new owners who, it could be said would be likely to be diametrically opposed to permitting a hovercraft racing event on their water. At things stand this years’ event is going ahead as planned, and going forward in a spirit of co operation with the trust it might be that in future years this round of the British Championships is held at the end of the bird breeding season in September.

We can expect visitors from the Trust during our race meeting, some may make us aware of their presence, others might not. We need to be on our metal here to show we do care about the properties we use and our zero harm policy. The usual race on hold policy if birds and their chicks stray out onto the racing line will apply and prickles will as usual be on his water born shepherding duties!

Have a safe trip to Nottingham, especially those travelling from Europe, and we look forward to seeing you all enjoying the great weather we are going to have this year.

You can download the course map here. (Adobe PDF)