At most Club functions I try to gather a list of names to generate the table printed later in the magazine. Other sources of data are the Club Magazine, the Names Book circulated at meetings and social Sips, and people who do the write-ups. This table is only as accurate as the data supplied. I would appreciate members pointing out errors so that the table can be amended. A reasonable amount of checking is conducted to ensure the data is as accurate as possible, but mistakes can be made, given the sheer volume of data entries required.

The table is fairly self explanatory with months from May 99 to April 2000 and the ride destinations along the top, a list of member names down the left and right sides, and the total number of ride points, people, bikes and cars per ride along the bottom axis. Personal points totals are tallied at the far right of the third page. I apologise for the size of print; if we didn’t have so many activities …. we wouldn’t be the MTCV.

I have made no attempt to interpret the figures, only to look at the personal totals. Obviously there is a great amount of other information that can be gleaned from the tables, such as the average number of bikes per ride, average number of people per function, average number of people per short ride, per long ride. If anyone would like to interpret these figures (as I have done in years gone by) and write a report, that would be fantastic. I can give you the file. Below are some things to consider.

Due to the unclean nature of the data, difficulties arise when meaningful information such as basic averages and various totals are extracted from the raw data. A number of arbitrary decisions have to be made, some of which are listed below.

When is a member a member? For the purpose of this discussion, new members are counted as members for every function they attended, remembering that they must have attended at least three functions as visitors before they were eligible to become members. It is too difficult and time consuming to work out exactly when such people became members.

What constitutes attending a ride? For the purpose of this discussion, anyone who travelled part way of the ride, or met the group at the destination (such as pub counter lunches, weekends away) scored a point. This covers the extremes of people who never left a ride and those who travelled only on the first leg of a number of rides. This is less of an issue this year than in previous years.

Only members are counted. People who go on a lot of rides but aren’t members — are statistically lost. Warwick Piper (FZR1000) and Dave Hives (ZX7, ZX9) spring to mind. It often applies to regular pillions.

Bearing all this in mind:

The top 10 participants for the year are Ian Payne with a score of 91, Ben Warden 87, Tim Walker 48, Geoff Jones 36, Wayne Grant 35, Rhys Williams 32, Rob Matricciani 30, Dianne Welsford 30, Derek Atkinson 28 and Theo Kalkandis 28.

For comparison, the top 10 Club Participants last year were Ben Warden with a score of 95.5, Ian Payne 77.5, Tim Walker 46, Lyn Duncan 45, Wayne Grant 43, Darren Hosking 36, John Willis 35, Ron Johnston 33, Rob Matricciani 33, and Dianne Welsford 32.

Ben Warden