Shop Talk Olson Camacho

Off-Road Editor Olson Camacho

SHOP TALK

HERE WE GO AGAIN

July served as a fruitful month for us at the Philippine Rallycross Series. We finally had our series running after a year of being halted due to the dreaded Coronavirus. That specific round had been crucial for us organizers as it served as a trial run of the new queuing system that we implemented. To share with you, PHRX has been organizing dirt time trial races since 2015 with the aim of reviving rally racing in the country which was dearly loved by Pinoy motorsports decades ago. Since then, the number of participants has been continuously growing. From 10 people when we started back in 2015, we normally have around 70 entries per round now.

The biggest surge in the number of participants was seen in 2018. The team has been very grateful that the sport is finally gaining support and following once again. But we will not deny that the sudden influx of participants caught us off guard. Since then, we have been trying different approaches to the event to make the schedule better. The most successful one we had was in the recent round last July. The organizers and the participants were very pleased with how everything turned out. The day-race was done around 4pm (there was a time in one of our races when we were racing the day stage until 10:00pm).

Delighted that we finally did well in terms of organizing the schedule, we were supposed to have the following round in the first week of August, but the number of COVID-19 cases surged just then.

Though most PHRX races are done outside the metro and the Clark Global City, the current track of PHRX allows races with strict observance of social distancing, limited number of participants, and minimum health protocols, the team opted to postpone the next round until the number of daily cases lowers, at least.

Right now, there is no better thing to do but to keep safe at home and stay healthy. Yes, we might be missing the adrenaline rush right now, but would rather have a complete PHRX family in the track once the cases become manageable.

We have a lot planned for the 2020 season of PHRX that we are hoping that could be done this 2021. We also wanted to host a full rally race complete with special stages again after the rallycross season but with the current COVID-19 trend, it’s likely to park those plans once more.

Hopefully, things will be better very soon and we can race on dirt again.

❝ Right now, there is no better thing to do but to keep safe at home and stay healthy. Yes, we might be missing the adrenaline rush right now, but would rather have a complete PHRX family in the track once the cases become manageable.

GET IN TOUCH ✉ olson@wheelsph.com