I know a lot have been wondering, so now that we think we know what we are doing, I will share it with the rest of you. I have really sat on this for too long already.
For a few years back now, the Koreans had run an Int’l F3 race, not sure where. My chums and connections over in Jolly Old England tell me that they took a handful of Marshals with them from the UK to communicate, as Race Control was run by the British with their international connections. I’m told that the rest of the work was done by a small bunch of mildly experienced Koreans and a legion of inexperienced but nonetheless enthusiastic college students!
There is an Internationally recognized Sporting Authority over there, named KARA, who have been patiently waiting in the wings all summer for the promoter to recognize them and vice versa. I have gotten very little in the way of hard numbers as to what the experience levels are over there, so to cover ourselves, at least for the first year, Champ Car has granted me a small budget to take over a handful of North American Marshals, whose job it will be to instruct, guide and help the Koreans, who should come with little or no experience, stand on their own within a year or two. In short, the better this little crew does, the less we will need them.
You have heard me preach many times that our company is still financially a long way from the heydays when we took two dozen people regularly to Mexico, South America, Japan and Europe. To keep expenses down, especially on domestic air travel, I was urged (with very few exceptions) to keep this Marshal group based in Southern California, where the charter will be leaving from.
My group is now selected and set. Certainly, I would have wanted it to be larger, but right now bucks is bucks. My first dream would have been an “executive” group made up of ALL my flag chiefs for all our events, but economy canned that idea, and it has been no easy chore to come up with JUST 13 people. We envision 10 posts, one on start with JD, one rover and one in reserve in case we sprout another post. We will place one from this team on each post, who will work with a translator to supervise the flagging, while the comm. line will be in Korean, hopefully gaining ground as the event progresses. We will have TV…
Those selected were chosen for the combined factors of their availability, experience with the series, proximity to Southern California, and what I hope will be most important, their skills as teachers and ambassadors. They will find themselves in some cases to be the only pure English speakers on their post, surrounded by those who have never done this before and that will be a high stress weekend, indeed.
Those of you who feel you could (or should) have been selected and are very disappointed, I don’t blame you. I only ask your understanding in what we are trying to do here in the context of where we are as we grow the series back to where it belongs. If you know me, then you already know how I feel about all of you.
Don’t know how to say “so long” in Korean yet.
Working on it.
JHS
