The Guyana Motor Racing and Sports Club (GMR&SC) has received approval from Guyana’s National COVID-19 Task force (NCTF) for the hosting of two events in March at the South Dakota Circuit.
The first event will be its Circuit Racing event set for the weekend of March 12 and 13 and the second is a drag racing event on the weekend of March 26-27. The approval came following a meeting with the NCTF and GMR&SC executives on Friday last at which the latter requested approval to run off the said events.
For the March 13 to 14 event, the club has secured permission to host an event with a ‘no spectator’ policy. GMR&SC President Rameez Mohamed said, “We must first and foremost thank the task force for granting us this approval. We met with them last week and they are working with the sport to allow for the best possible outcome.”
“With this approval for the [March 13] event, we can move ahead to getting all our other plans like the track closure from the CJIA, all other safety and necessary arrangements in place to ensure the running of our first circuit racing event of the year,” he added.
As it relates to the drag racing weekend on March 26-27, the club has secured clearance for a limited amount of spectators.
According to committee member Nyron Maraj, “All spectators need to be fully vaccinated. The Task Force has mandated us to put out two checkpoints for this purpose. A first checkpoint at the entrance to the track (Glass factory road) where teams will be checking for vaccination cards and corresponding IDs and the second is where we will verify these books and ID once again to ensure that no unvaccinated person slips in. We want to make it clear that tickets alone will not get you into this event. Persons need to bring along their vaccination books.”
“As it relates to ticket sales, the club will begin selling on March 23 and tickets will not be sold at the gates, only at the Club’s office. That is one of the areas the task force was very strict with. They said to us that tickets must not be sold on the day and must not be sold at the venue. And the tickets themselves will be limited in number. We will decide on the amount to be sold in the coming weeks,” he continued.
The task force via letter has outlined strict sanitization policies for all participants, officials, and volunteers present on the day with social distancing and mask wearing being actively monitored.
Enforcement of these measures will be done by the club with supervision from the task force and all persons present at the facility will be randomly selected for the presentation of books and corresponding ID’s. Adult tickets will cost $2,000 dollars while children under 12 will cost $500.
