Gird up for that kartin’ startin’ gridline
Insurkarting time will soon be here again. The good, the great, the movers, the shakers, anyone, indeed, who’s anyone in the world of motor insurance and allied sectors is sure to be counting down the days now until 23 September when twenty odd teams of mad-keen motorkarters line up to go head to head round the world-renowned PIF Motorkartway.
Like so many other things during these last few plague-grim years, insurance karting has been away too long. Not since June 2019, back in the carefree days of the second decade of the twenty-first century, have motor insurance folk had a chance to enjoy the unalloyed joys of alternate bouts of haring round the UK’s longest outdoor cart track (more than 1381m in length) and networking it up with the cream of the cream of their peers.
Teams of eight or fewer drivers will enjoy a lavish butty on arrival, light refreshments and beverages throughout the day, and a delicious buffet lunch at lunchtime. Registration is at 8.30am, followed by an enthralling safety briefing. Then, following various practice and qualifying laps, the big race kicks off at 10.30am.
Each team can switch drivers as often as it likes until the race finally comes to an end, many many hours later when someone eventually decides wave a black and white chequered flag. For those who hanker for racing of briefer duration, we’ve added an hour-long sprint race to the main event.
So, you see, there’s something for literally everyone this year. What, even people for people who long to simulate the frantic every-millisecond-counts type pressure of a Formula 1 mid-race wheel change?, you might reasonably be wondering.
Yes, even them! Because, for this year’s Pitstop Challenge, we’ve borrowed Sebastian Fettle’s Aston Martin Formula Uno racecar from the FIA’s technical impoundment zone, where it’s been held since Fettle appealed his Hungarian Grand Prix disqualification, and we’ll be using this real live genuwine racecar in place of whichever ropey old banger the IE karters would otherwise have been practising their pitstop prowess on.
So, what are you waiting for, get over to Ensurance Indurance site at once and see if there’s still a chance for you and your associates to snap up one of the last few team places.
Portholes in road ahead
Bankstone News seems to recall it was renowned Scots philosopher and economist Adam Smith who once famously observed that ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’. And speaking of passing things through implausibly restrictive apertures, there have lately been developments in the unfolding story of HMG’s whiplash porthole – see previous coverage.
You’ll no doubt recall that whip-hurt punters were finding it way too easy to claim significant sums of cash in compensation for quite-possibly-trumped-up cervical injuries, and that the government had decided to make it harder and less lucrative for them so to do. And that’s just what they’ve done.
Part One of the Curtailment of Legal Access (CLA) Act finally came into force on 31 May this year, putting a price on people’s pain with a fixed tariff of damages for various grades of whiplashedness, putting all claims worth £5k or less on a small ‘claims track’ passing (or possibly not passing) through the aforementioned porthole, and largely relieving insurers of the burdensome necessity of covering claimant lawyers’ costs.
Having effectively severed the link between claimants and claimant lawyers, the government has clearly set a premium on user-freindliness in designing its claims porthole, with the result that it really couldn’t be simpler for injured people to give up and go away. Not only must they pass through the porthole itself, they must also jump through a variety of associated hoops including a requirement to provide medical evidence of hurtness.
Businesses like Legal Expenses Insurance (LEI) insurers may be interested to know that Bankstone Limited Ltd is one of just 24 FCA-regulated firms with the required permissions (not to mention the dark-arts type skills) to pass claims safely through the porthole. So if you are associated with such a business, and you’d like some value-added professional assistance with your porthole passage needs, please don’t hesitate to contact the aforementioned Bankstone Limited Ltd. They’re really very good!
Time to up your LEI game?
Just as the flogging of old rope is generally frowned on these days, sales of the vast majority of legal expenses insurance (LEI) policies currently on offer to unsuspecting members of the Great British public may soon be attracting similar opprobrium.
Word has reached Bankstone News’ lovely lugholes of late that LEI could well be the next PPI. Now that the time limit on pursuing claims for miss-sold payment protection insurance policies has finally elapsed, legions of claims wranglers who might otherwise be standing idle could soon be going after purveyors of less-than-value-added LEI products – not least those products less than perfectly configured to perform strongly in a post-CLA universe.
In the context of the FCA’s ongoing war on add-ons, the kind of underwhelming LEI policies that brokers buy for pennies and flog on for pounds could soon find themselves spotlit in the most unflattering of lights. With the RTA-afflicted now effectively on their own in their injured hour of need, those without LEI may be sensing its want, while those with under-performing policies may be feeling aggrieved.
So, if you feel you might be in any way associated with the purveyal of an LEI policy that is less than fully fit for purpose (FFP), now might be a good time to review your options. The FCA takes a dim view these days – not just of any perceived failure to treat customers fairly – but, in particular, of any down-letting of customers of the vulnerable variety.
And, let’s face it, persons recently injured in a motor RTA might not unreasonably be deemed at least a tad vulnerable, simply by dint of that circumstance, on which basis, their brokers might want to reflect on their duty to minimise that vulnerability, rather than find themselves accused – perhaps not altogether unjustly – of having exacerbated it through their failure to provide appropriate LEI.
If you’re anything less than 110% confident of the quality of the LEI policies you’re selling, you really should get in touch with those extremely helpful and knowledgable people at Bankstone – and they’ll be able to sort you out with a FREE assessment and/or the chance to switch to something that’s fully FFP.
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