Horse Meat

There you are in the shop, buying your burgers and expecting to get beef because that’s what it says on the packet, and what to you get?  Apparently some burgers, we are told, could simply contain anything with the beef in very small quantities if at all.  I guess it’s just a case of you tend to get what you pay for, so if you go into one of the low end supermarkets and buy 20 “value” burgers for £1 I think it’s fair to say that you’d be pretty grateful they actually had any meat in them at all, never mind horse (or possibly donkey).

Supermarkets and food shops of course come in all shapes and sizes and are catering for all sectors of the market; and there’s nothing wrong at all with that.

That brings me back to track days so I suppose it’s not difficult to guess where this is leading.  A cheap open pit lane track day just ain’t going to have the same quality of beef in it that a more expensive day has, all things being equal.  Fine if you don’t mind spending time in the pit lane queue, and I hesitate to say this but nevertheless it’s true, that you’ll generally experience more sheds dropping oil and breaking down on a cheap day too.

Many years ago now I worked on a prestigious project at Heathrow.  The architects used quite a useful analogy to describe the quality of job the team was aiming for.  They looked at white goods as being the bottom of the market.  We aren’t at the white goods end.  They compared Sainsburys with Waitrose.  The project aimed at achieving Waitrose quality; that is towards the high end.  I guess nowadays it would be Aldi and Marks & Spencer in the comparison of basic to highest quality with a bit of premium pricing thrown in for good measure.

We aren’t at the Aldi end of the spectrum.  We think we are about in the middle which is a nice place to be in my view and it allows us to run good quality days at a reasonable price.

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