It's vital that racing's marketing men, in searching for a new audience, don't cheese off the old one or desecrate what is cherished within our sport Which brings me to proposals to shunt the Cheltenham Festival into the weekend.
From 2012, the four-day meeting is set to start on Wednesday and finish on Saturday.
The Gold Cup will, as now, be run on the Friday of the fixture, with the Champion Hurdle on Wednesday, the Queen Mother Champion Chase on Thursday and the World Hurdle moved from Thursday to Saturday.
The bulk of what I've read this week seems to put this proposed move firmly in the 'win-win' category, but it's not that simple.
Parallels have been drawn with Ascot's fifth day, in which Ascot Heath was turned into the final day of the Royal meeting - but they are bogus.
For a start, Ascot already raced on a Saturday, and the Heath fixture was dying to be souped up - the feature, the Listed Churchill Stakes, was a joke.
And Royal Ascot doesn't have a shape - you can kid yourself that the Gold Cup, on Thursday, is the highlight, but at the expense of the other Group 1 events run during the week? Get away with you. Ascot doesn't build through a crescendo to a climax - it has five days that are roughly the equal of each other, and then it ends.
The Cheltenham Festival, three days or four, isn't like that. It has to increase towards a finale, and that finale requires the Gold Cup as its centrepiece.
And the differences don't end there.
Much of Cheltenham's crowd camps in the town for the whole week. There's a team feeling among them that, win lose or draw, they're there for the long haul.
Ascot's customer base is made up largely of daytrippers, who get on the train at Waterloo in the morning then return there, often unable to stand, 10 hours later. As a rule, they are not as bothered, or as knowledgeable about the racing as the Cheltenham throng - they just want to get hammered.
In trying to push the old Thursday crowd of 60,000 to 65,000 on Saturday, Cheltenham's top brass might find those who have stayed for the first three days decide to give their wallets, and livers, a day off and watch the final day on the box.
They will also find that Cheltenham on Saturday has plenty of competition when it comes to sports bulletins - and, therefore, exposure.
Around this time of the year, there are FA Cup quarter-finals to think about, not to mention the conclusion of the Six Nations rugby. Do you think the racing will get a look in if England are on the verge of the Grand Slam? Thought not.
Let this be a warning to Cheltenham bosses and Racing For Change, who might be looking to embrace the change.
If you meddle by moving the Thursday card to Saturday, not only will you destroy the character of the Cheltenham Festival - you could end up poorer as a result.
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