Although I have only been in the role of Powerboat Racing World’s Contributing Editor since November, I thought as it was Christmas I would compile a small wish list that might make this job slightly easier.

Whilst I appreciate that we are only in December and there are still a few months to go before racing gets back under way my first wish would be that before publishing a ‘provisional’ racing calendar please Santa could you take a closer look at it to eliminate as many date clashes as possible.

I’m well aware that most championship seasons start in May and run through till September, so there is a limited amount of weekends to put an event on and that the likelihood of every National Federation, Championship Promotor, and local organiser managing to piece together that perfect jigsaw puzzle is highly unlikely.

But (you knew there was one coming), you can imagine my frustration when I saw that the 70th Edition of the Pavia-Venice International Motorboat Raid, which will take place on Sunday 5 June 2022, clashes with the UIM F2 World Championship round taking place in Vila Velha de Ródão, Portugal, it does make me wonder how this has been allowed to happen. Afterall The Raid Pavia-Venice closed its well-publicised entry list of 130 competitors, with the likes of the reigning UIM F2 World Champion Rashed Al Qemzi and his Team Manager Guido Cappellini amongst them months before the 2022 racing calendar was published. Hopefully, situations like this can be resolved.

My second wish is that National Federations, Championship Promotors, and local organisers realise the positive benefits of publicising their events. If you are putting on a race it’s not just us that want to know about it. When I checked the spelling of ‘publicising’ it said it was a verb; to make (something) widely known. Its Synonyms were: make known, make public, bring to public notice/attention, announce, report, and communicate.

Whilst we certainly don’t expect every event to be ‘Live Streamed’ I think the racers that compete should at least have some form of coverage made available on the day to the media. It certainly shouldn’t be left to one of the teams to publicise the whole event. Way back when I first started in powerboat racing we would sit around the office on a Monday morning waiting for the fax machine to spring into life bringing us the results via the UIM office. These days emails containing results, quotes from the racers and images can be sent out within hours of the race concluding. Yes, I hear you say that you don’t have the budget to carry this out, but you never will have until you start making the outside world aware of what you are doing and please believe me when I say there are people out there who are interested

My final wish is that we are all able to race next year in a safe environment and that all your Christmas wishes would come true.

Merry Christmas & a Healthy New Year.