Travelling by rail in this country is rubbish, in fact it’s worse than rubbish, it’s worse than snowboarding into a load of frozen cow droppings - a fate that befell a friend of mine a while ago. He recounted this to me as I was sat on a motionless train stuck somewhere between Teddington and the Outer Hebrides. On another recent railway induced piece of thinking time, I got a bit fanciful.

Imagine if you will, that you had control of the transport system in this country, unlimited funding and had been given the task of getting the working population of Britain about the place. What would you do? Well like any schoolboy bored of his existing Scalextric layout, tear it all up and start again. New tracks, new trains, new staff - everything. It is pretty drastic, but I'm pretty sure it would work - eventually.

It’s like anything that is messy, disorganised and generally rubbish - the best solution is to bin the lot and start again. Now apply this line of thinking to motorsport. I say scrap the lot. British motorsport is, quite frankly, rubbish. Sprinting in the southeast has been seriously injured and is on life support - however the signs are not good, the patient may not last the week. Circuit racing is in a seemingly irreparable shambles, 144 series with race entry fees heading for stratospheric levels. Spectators have lost interest and resorted to having punch ups outside Swedish furniture shops instead. The poor situation in racing is worse than everyone thinks too, as most meetings fail to attract even the proverbial one man and his dog, as the dog is probably banned!

The rest of the sport is clearly following it on a lemming-like mission into oblivion. You may as well take up caravanning now (could I recommend MN's distant relation Practical Caravan?) after all there’s going to be nowhere left to play that isn't a short oval.

So how do we avert this problem? Burn it all down and start again? I propose that at the beginning of 2006, all motorsport is banned in Britain for six months, whilst the whole sport is reworked. Starting with the “Blue Book”. That entire mess of legalese and over regulation must be totally written from scratch - with the sport’s best interests and common sense prevalent, something that currently is not the case. Look at it, pages and pages of over complex ramblings and wranglings, it is a fact the “Blue Book” that puts new competitors off.

Along with the rewrite, every single series and club should have to reapply for all permits - no exemptions - the BRC should have to reapply as should the Sevenoaks Speed League. Permits and affiliations should only be granted to entities that can prove their worth, the club rally scene should be fine, but a certain Southern Welsh event should start sweating. This means some serious reworking of the way the sport works could happen – series amalgamations and rationalisation could be imposed.

There is a clear feeling at the moment that the MSA are not getting things quite right, the circuit racing championship permit fiasco is an example. You only need to look at the letters in Motorsport News to see it and if you don’t think that’s right, have a look online at websites like Ten-tenths.com and msauk.info. None of them have come up with a simple answer yet, but the sentiment is clear – whilst flawed the MSA is all we’ve got, let’s help them to help us. But how?

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