Originally Posted by
Triple V
The way I see things....it's infinitely easier to co-opt someone when they're eating the paint off the walls & don't have enough $ in their pocket to fill up their car, let alone take their girlfriend out for dinner every once in a while.
As disturbing and unpalatable as it might be for some people to read, if what I've been told is accurate and I've no reason to doubt it at all, it was not so very long ago that the services of a few impressionable young up & coming participants were initially secured for little more than the price of a meal at a Chinese Restaurant.
That's how it all starts off. "Geeze, isn't old mate such a nice bloke, he asked us along, paid for dinner"...etc etc etc. Next thing, ring ring, ring ring "Hey, it's old mate here, yeh, we had Chinese the other night, I was wondering...you know that horse you're driving in Race 3....."
I'm not in the least bit surprised that those blokes did what they did/do what they do either because the gates were well & truly left wide open & the dinner bell was ringing. To them it is nothing personal, it's just the way they put food on the table.
In a great many respects the Industry itself, from top to bottom, played an admittedly unwitting though nonetheless responsible hand in that sort of thing ultimately coming to pass. Those quick buck boys are always around & they were essentially left free to pray upon a whole host of people, especially so youngsters with very little or no guidance/mentoring, and also those who had begun to see little or no career path & who, for their efforts, had earned little or no money.
One well known participant in particular, I know for a fact he had long been calling for (some 4-5 years prior to July/August 2011) a mentoring process to be put in place for young drivers for example. To my knowledge nothing ever happened save the idea time and again being given the usual lip service/the mirror routine..."Yeh, that's a good idea...we'll look into that".
I can't help but be left with the feeling that a large slice of what has come to pass in recent times could have been greatly diminished/all but avoided, had the Industry's head been a little less jammed up its own clacker & its financial circumstances different. It doesn't excuse their behaviour of course...some had more than enough kanga on hand prior to embarking on their dodgy excursions... but for a numer of the smaller but nonetheless vital bit players, I feel it does go some way towards explaining it.
In an attempt to offset much of the above, HRNSW spreading the $ around and putting a bit of the folding stuff in a lot of people's pockets & showing them, especially so the younger brigade, a genuine career path...one that leads beyond what sort of stunt is going to be pulled this week or next week...is going to help no end. As naive as it may seem...I believe that given the opportunity, most people will inherently do the right thing.
You'll never stop them all of course, for some it wouldn't matter if we were racing week in week out to win City blocks, they would still be a smarty & try to subvert it to their benefit, but by and large if there's more $ going around then it makes the task of those people who'd do seek to do the wrong thing a whole lot harder.
