Karting no go

It's been a long time since I have woken up early on a weekend. 6am, to be exact. That was the time I woke up on Saturday. The reason? my-Kart Round 3 DRIVERS 2008 Series event at Shah Alam. No, I wasn't there to race. Not going as a spectator either. Rather, I was there as a volunteer for the event.

My company's sports club has requested for volunteers for Saturday's event and in return, the teams sending volunteers will be rewarded with points for participation. You see...our sports club has cleverly divided the staff into color coded team (...just like back in school days) and each time there is any activity organised, the respective teams will be rewarded with points for members participation. As added bonus on Saturday, we, the volunteers are also allowed 10mins track session on the 80cc stroke karts after the race event ended. Yahoo! Anyway, back to my earlier story....

My office mate picked me up at 6.45am and we headed over to Citykarting at Shah Alam Kart Circuit. Am so not used to being up and around with the sky still dark. The place was not even organised when we reached there so we just stood around...since we had no idea what we are supposed to do anyway. Volunteers mah...

Went over to speak to Mark Timms, our contact person from my-Kart whom I found out is also from one of our subsidiaries...ahaks. Mark himself admitted to being disorganised and asked that we hang around first. Racing members started coming in slowly. A few office mates arrived and we received our first duty notifications. 2 persons needed to help out with merchandising, 1 person needed to input race results and 1 person to help out with kart grid line-up. I decided to choose the 2nd task :-)

I guess God didn't intend for this event to proceed because it started raining....drizzling at first...then heavy rain. Or maybe God didn't want us to work so hard on a Saturday morning...ahaks. Everyone just hung around waiting for the rain to stop. There was announcement by the my-Kart team later that certain categories (K1 & K2) of the race had to be cancelled due to insufficient time. Seemed that the whole race had to end by 3pm. 5 hours are needed for the race which means the race had to start by 10am, at the latest. The track required at least 30mins for the rain water to subside which means the rain need to stop by 9am.

See...sky dark dark

While idling around, I chatted with one of the racer, Rizal Hamid who also worked as a stuntman for the local film industry. I wasn't interested to hear about the racing bit. Rather, I got some very useful tips from him on fitness and gaining weight.

The rain didn't stop by 9.45am so the race was cancelled. Racers are allowed to go on the track if they wish but there will be no championship points. Most of them packed up and left. The race will be postponed to March 16th, Sunday. Will not be able to volunteer on this day....anyway, it didn't matter...our team already got our maximum points. Yahoo!

Everyone hanging around waiting for the rain to stop...