The continuing impact of high fuel prices recently caused cancellation of one of the region’s traditional top motor-sport events, as western NSW golf days and horse-riding competitions are also impacted by the continuing crisis.

For Dubbo City Speedway, abandoning their annual Easter race weekend at Morris Park Speedway was ultimately down to financial viability, club president Cameron Howard explained.

“Normally, we run races on the Easter Saturday and Sunday but, unfortunately, we had to just cancel,” Cameron revealed.

“it was mostly to do with fuel, a lot of our drivers come from the coast, all the way from Newcastle down to Goulburn,” he added.

He said that for the majority of competitors it’s simply not a case of filling up the car and heading west.

“It’s not so much the fuel for the racing, that’s not that high in itself, it’s overall costs.

“Most of the cars are transported by a small truck with a trailer and they have to come a long way to compete,” Cameron said.

With a range of other financial pressures and the main western road route to and from Sydney at Victoria Pass closed indefinitely, it all just added up, he believes.

“We’ve had fairly slow nominations, probably also due to cost of living, high rents, high inflation, we still have the hard-core enthusiasts, and we often have fields of 30-something.

“For instance, we had 25-something in the ‘wingless sprints’ last year, and only 10 this year; this year we only had 60-odd competitors nominating overall with about 44 for the Saturday and about 32 for the Sunday,” Cameron said.

The club said in a social media post announcing the cancellation: “The decision had not been made lightly.”

“With low car nominations and the continued pressure of the current financial climate, particularly rising fuel costs and travel costs, it has become clear that proceeding would not deliver the event our competitors or fans deserve,” the post added.

Cameron explained that, not only has the number of competitors ready to make the trip west decreased, but the club’s own overheads have also ballooned.

“Our costs are high, and we also use a lot of diesel at the track for our graders, the water truck, and generators for the lights… we use 200 litres of diesel for a meet,” Cameron said. “We also pay a lot for specially-trained first-aid people to attend each meet.”

With a range of races on the cards from juniors, to wingless, production, street stockers, AMCA, and speed-cars, the event is one of the premier events in western NSW.

“This is one of our biggest meets of the year with about 800 fans expected to turn-up, so it has been a bit of a let-down for us,” Cameron said.

“The PCYC was also going to come out and cater for food, and they miss out, and Mr Whippy and other vans like that, they also support the event,” he concluded

Locals are being urged to now get out and support the next meet of the volunteer-run speedway to be held in the coming weeks.

“We now shift our focus to our (Saturday) May 9 meeting and we’re committed to coming back bigger and stronger withy a great night of racing for all… Flat Out, Full Noise, No Limits,” the club said in another recent post.