Thursday, 14 February 2019

Rally - The Vnuk Case


On the basis of, 'we're not quite out of the woods yet' to coin a phrase, the news that the latest step in ensuring that motorsport vehicles are excluded from the scope of the new EU Motor Insurance Directive (MID) has been passed, is nevertheless most encouraging.

Never ones to make things simple, especially when complications add time and cost to their endeavours, the MEPs in the European Parliament voted yesterday (13th Feb) to approve the amendment that motorsport vehicles be excluded from the proposed new law. Unfortunately that's not quite the end of the matter, yet.

However it has paved the way for the next step in the process for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) to negotiate these rules with the EU Council of Ministers to gain their approval before they come into force.

Sadly, this is not a 'rubber stamp' job as the Council, which consists of an individual Minister from each EU Member State, could take a different position from that of the MEPs and Parliament and decide to keep motorsport within the scope of this legislation!

Fortunately there are a number of specialist bodies including the FIA, Motorsport UK and the Motorsport Industry Association amongst others throughout Europe working away and lobbying the relevant ministers and departments on our behalf.

How important is this? Failure to have motor sport excluded from this legislation would incur huge insurance costs on individuals and events that would either kill off the sport altogether or set the sport back to its origins whereby only the rich and privileged could afford to take part. And that would rule most of us out.

Now we have to wait for the puff of white smoke from the exalted chambers, or maybe not, smoke is banned these days and classed as harmful emissions, is it not - we just can't win, can we?

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