We have recently received this communication from David Baigent, President of the Sprite Club of Australia (NSW Sprite Club).

Another major event affected by the uncertainty of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Dear Sprite Club Presidents,

As you are all aware the ongoing situation with the COVID-19 Pandemic is causing major disruption to the way we go about our lives. Recent outbreaks in both Sydney and Melbourne have resulted in lockdowns and restrictions on travel. It looks like we are going to have to live with this uncertainty until we have sufficient people in the community vaccinated and our whole approach to living with COVID-19 changes to something like we are now seeing in the US and in Europe. As has been well publicised, Australia has been somewhat left behind in this exercise and we are looking at the end of 2021 as the earliest possible date for this to occur.

This has obviously had a great deal of disruption to the efforts of the SCCA team who have specifically been tasked with organising the Sprite National Challenge for 2022. Normally by this time we would have visited a number of venues and started roughing out our plans however this just has not been possible and we have become extremely nervous about where we are up to in planning but also the potential for further disruption between now and Easter 2022.

The SCCA committee has deliberated on this matter for considerable time and have come to the conclusion that it remains too risky to run an event in 2022 and are therefore cancelling our plans to host the Nationals in 2022.

We realise that this may come as a shock to some of you and your members but we believe that until the country becomes stable and united in all States with regards to living with Covid, the risks are too great to run an interstate gathering. With this in mind we would like to leave the organisation of the Nationals for future years open for discussion. By this I mean, we should decide if we want to try and run an event in 2023 or leave it to 2024 to maintain the ‘even year’  We, SCCA, are also open to who should run the next Nationals, which we are happy to do but are also open to others if they wish to step in.

Please pass this information on to your members.

Regards

David Baigent                                                                                                             

President – Sprite Car Club of Australia