(By Stephan Sookram in Jamaica, compliments of Buy Me Auto Sales, B.M. Soat Auto sales, Rent-a-tent and Fly Jamaica).

LOGISTICAL problems continued to plague this weekend’s first round of the Caribbean Motor Racing Championship (CMRC) at the Jamwest Raceway in Jamaica.Yesterday’s qualification session was plagued with its own problems, not only for the Guyanese, but for all competitors as a timing-system failure caused a fair bit of discomfort.
Firstly, off to a late start, the qualification session commenced with the CMRC bikes.
Two laps into the bike qualification, the clouds opened up and emptied its contents onto the Jamwest surface, meaning that the bikes had to return to the pit area to re-run their qualification at a later time.
Up next came the CMRC group two cars which went onto the track for their 20-minute session, none of which was recorded on the local timing system which seemed to be functioning but not responding.
After a 20-minute break to assess the next step, the local organising committee decided that the best route to fix the problem was to have the manual timing system re-employed (where each time-keeper uses a stopwatch to time a particular car).
This meant that only two cars at a time could qualify, leading to a longer than expected afternoon for competitors as their hand-qualified times then had to be transferred to the organising committee to be sorted and matched.
As such, a handful of group three and four competitors were able to qualify as some opted out of having their cars manually timed.
Up to 18:00hrs last evening, the results of the various classes and their starting positions for today’s event could not be confirmed.
It is unclear what the JRDC will do for the requalification of the CMRC 2 cars and the superbikes, though according to CMRC rules, qualification sessions can be held on race-day if necessary.
The other option and the one most likely to be employed is the hand-in-bag method which means that competitors will have to randomly pull their grid positions from a bag, though no official comment was made on the matter.
Earlier, The Jamaica Race Drivers Club (JRDC) decided by majority participant votes that a contentious new section of the track would not be used.
According to the drivers and riders, the new section is very slippery as the asphalt used to repave the spot was beginning to release oil, making it very difficult to control vehicles in that sector.
Today’s session begins at 09:00hrs.