How many races is too many?

Ken Killam said:

What is it that spurs such indignation? I point out the obvious, and you assume some dark, underlying insult? Please...

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How you say something can be as meaningful as what you say. Stating that someone is "pretty set in their ways" is never taken as a positive and usually taken as a negative.

If you write something and intend one thing, but everyone around you takes it as another, it doesn't make a lot of sense to assume it's the readers that are off the mark...

I'm all for more double races. More racing, fewer weekends.

There are at least three types of drivers at Conference events: (i) dedicated Conference racers working for season points; (ii) Conference racers who do the events that are convenient, but don't care about season points, and (iii) non-Conference racers who sometimes do a local Conference race when it fits their schedule.

For the second and third groups, the more race weekends you have, the merrier, since it gives more options. I suspect the Pacific Raceways and PIR events are always pretty full, and I suspect that there is a much higher percentage of entrants at those events who come from (ii) and (iii) above than at the "outlying" tracks, where fewer people will "drop in" for a race.

I don't race for points, so I don't really have a stake in how Conference decides their season championships. But, if I did, I would find the present schedule overwhelming already. And I certainly would resent it if any more races were added that I had to go to.

Perhaps a compromise, if the individual clubs want more dates (and think that doing so is to their economic benefit), would be to limit the number of races that count toward a championship. For example, I think that anyone who enters ten races shouldn't be at a disadvantage to anyone who enters more than that; this is an amateur, and very expensive, activity, and when we count all races toward season points, we're often rewarding racing budget (and free time) more than we're rewarding racing excellence.

FFT, I hope.

There appears to be two main camps of opinion here.
(1)The Pro-active approach of seeking a solution to too many events divided between a fixed number of paying customers. Rick is correct in that this is a complex issue to tackle. Getting concensus on a solution strategy will be like herding cats.
(2)The Re-active approach, inclined to let economic forces decide for us how events will be scheduled amongst the tracks/clubs. If we just allow the organic process of economic forces decide, what collateral damage (economic damage) to clubs, tracks and racers can/will occur while this all shakes out?

Q: Why, when faced with too many events (and more tracks to be offered in the near future, it appears) do we hear comments about clubs fearing 'losing dates' if they scale back events?

I'm totally with Eric and Mark on the number of dates and/or how much of my year involves race-related days.

As for Dave's question about "losing dates," I wonder how much of that is historical, back when there were A)fewer tracks and B)more demand? If Pacific Raceways is actually lowering their rental rates, I have to think the demand for track dates is reduced enough that it could/should be much less of a concern than before.

I hope the forces who will make the final decisions about our schedule are taking notes. There has been some very good analysis from a number of people.

2 cents:
This year we raced, on average, every other weekend.

Why do we do this? Because it's fun; we are addicted to the adrenaline hit; we enjoy the people, etc. My husband-- who builds, repairs, hauls, etc. my racecar, but doesn't drive-- told me I could quote him as saying, "Go for it! Put as many races in the schedule as you can. We're doing it because it's fun!" Go figure.
Personally, I'm not sure, with my kids still at home, that I could handle more races than this year. On the other hand, the racetrack is one of my favorite places to be. Got to decide what your priorities are in life--doing laundry or going racing? Duh, we only live once!

Next 2 cents:
For me personally, the championship is a good thing. I like the challenge. It gives me another reason (I know it's a stupid, "cheap" piece of acrylic...) to keep going when I'm tired or things aren't going well. There are a number of races we wouldn't have attended without the incentive of the points. Not necessarily the brightest logic, but I'm glad I went--I had best race of my "career" at the August Seattle race we were going to drop.

I believe that Mike O.'s suggestions for an in-depth survey could be very useful (I'm not sure, but it sounded like he was volunteering...).
Knowing what drives the racer's decisions would be very helpful. Having the volunteer workers input is critical.
For instance, Seattle's track surface and the obnoxious heat of pitting on their wide expanse of BLACK top in August were driving our original race choice. That's something the club can do nothing about, but knowing the info would be helpful. If everyone felt similarly, then having a double-race there in August wouldn't necessarily raise the entries.

Per Dave's comments: I think we need to be Pro-Active! We won't get it perfect; not everyone will be satisfied or happy; but we will be steps ahead of the place we'd be if we just sit on our thumbs and wait to see what happens if we run everyone into the ground with a glutted schedule.

Let's keep it fun!

Would the drivers be receptive to there being an ad-hoc committee formed to draw up a survey/questionaire to gather some opinions/figures? This ad-hoc group doesn't need to be more than a handful of people.

What would be the best way to get the most responses to said surveyquestionaire?

Can our Web-Guru set up an autofil type section, or should it just mailed/emailed out and we cross our fingers that there will be more than a dozen responses.

"Herding cats" or just plain complacency that someone else will fix it or....."I'll race when I want no matter what the shcedule" might end up being the end result.

This same thing has been talked about for going on 3 years now, but the talk has been fractured.
If someone doesn't pull it together this year, we will be talking about this for ANOTHER 3 years.

Which way do we go???

The reference to losing date is what is available at a track for each club. EG: CSCC has had 5 race weekends, including the enduro. If CSCC were to drop a weekend at PIR they'd never get it back. So, what do they do with it if they don't drop it and ICSCC puts out a 3 race schedule for them? There are lots of possibilities but the one sure thing CSCC does not want to do is drop it from PIR's schedule.

I still say we wrassle fer it.

As for a survey, they can be helpful and CSCC/Holly did put one together for the enduro. What was the result? CSCC did what was asked for and only had 17 entries. Can the event survive with that kind of input without action? No.

"Like" the wrassle fer it concept.

But that is kinda what happens right now. Each E-Bd Rep takes the scheduling desires of their particular clubs to the meeting. These agendas may have committed dates with their individual track ba that time, some may not. But at the Fall Meeting they throw what they've got into a pile to figure out. That's the wrasslin' part. Then somebody rings a bell, changes tape/CD and it's the next round.

Randy Blaylock said:

Bob, championship eligibilty is half the races on any given year, for purposes of total points it's the ten best races.

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Right you are, of course. I was looking at it from the (narrow) perspective of a driver who races in a big class where one needs 10 races for a top 5 championship points finish.

I guess the way I'm taking the CSCC wrassle thang is, that coopetition thing. Business as usual. It's missing the point of this whole discussion.

Maybe the question we need to answer, before any discussion can be worthwhile is:

Are we a collection of mostly autonomous sports car clubs, that just happen to be affiliated with a larger body that facilitates our self interests, mostly uninterested in how the other clubs fare? Or, are we a mostly homogeneous body that has a larger objective, that just happens to be made up of a nice variety of subgroups that exist as subgroups primarily due to geographic forces?

I speak for me, not CSCC, on the wrassle thing

But Randy you bring up good points. We are separate Clubs with different approaches, but with the same desire: To Race. Should weeliminate the individual club concept then? I am not for it. But I think we do a pretty good job overall in how we go about business. If we all had endless pots of money to draw funds from this would not be so much an issue, or if there weren't only so many volunteer workers to help us do what we love so much. There is a limit and we need to come up with a good suggestion as to how to figure it out.

There are set costs for running a race. The entry fees need to cover those costs. It is obvious if you plan on having a few entries at an event the costs will be high. More entries, lower costs.

Why not a graduated entry fee? Hard to figure out what that would be until after everyone is actually there, but it could lead to a surprising outcome.

I know one thing. I can't afford to race 17 races. Nor even 8.5 races needed to qualify for championship points. Therefore I will not contribute to 8.5 race events. Sorry to all the clubs I can't make it to (really, I mean it and wish I could).

Conference is a group. The clubs are not autonomous--rather, we all have an effect on the others members within that group. We need to all work together to keep Conference a viable entity. If a member/club does not play well with others, it will negatively effect the whole.

Part of the beauty of Conference is the generous opportunity to run multiple venues. We need to take care of that.

My opinion is that a survey is only going to be useful if you put it in peoples' hot little hands. I suspect you need to mail it to licensed drivers/novices from the last 2 years and also any volunteers that can be found from the last 2 years. This will require the cooperation from a number of people, and certainly will need someone to head this up. (Mike?) I don't know that I can volunteer for that as we are playing catch-up with homeschooling right now (hazards of a mom who races...).

We in the racing community suffer from an embarrassment of riches here in the Northwest. Most of the country isn't even within decent driving distance of ONE roadcourse much less FIVE! We could be literaly months away from SIX!!! Longest possible tow from one track to another maybe 6 hours or less? Are you kidding me? Even in other areas or the country that do have a track there are drivers that have never raced anywhere but that one venue as all the rest are just too big a tow for small time, grassroots, amateur racers.

Don't think for a moment we aren't lucky to have a smorgasbord of tracks to race - I think we have grown used to the variety of the challenges offered and may be just a little spoiled. Finding a way to balance all of these tracks is really a good problem to have!

We need to make sure that our members are fully informed that if they fail to support a given event, club, track, or organization the potential outcome is that they will not be offered that option in the future. The free market is one of the best examples of actual freedom available. When presented too many choices, a consumer will select the ones that are most valuable to them and and skip the rest. It is voting with your dollars pure and simple and an unescapable fact of life. What we can't really do is cut the supply of what people want to force them to take what they don't. Controlling the supply of steak (track "A") to force people to eat liver (Track "B") just doesn't work unless it is an alternative to starvation. Some portion of the people will decide to eat chicken (spend time with their families) or pork (buy a boat instead of a racecar) if all that is available is liver.

I'm open to anything that A) Satisfies the members who I represent, and B) Keeps racing alive and strong in the NW. Keep trying!

Uh, Rick, did you skip lunch...?

A survey is a great idea, if properly promoted.

We did a similar type of survey with the local BMW Club 10 years ago (and are doing another right now). You'll want to print the full survey in the Memo so everyone knows that the survey is out there. Some can fill it out and mail it in. However most will do the survey on-line. Even 10 years ago we found that 75% of the BMW Club respondents took our survey on-line. Nowdays you could set up a survey pretty easy on SurveyMonkey.com

As an incentive to get club members to take the survey, we offered up a couple of raffle prizes donated by local businesses. You had to take the survey to be eligible for a raffle prize. Raffle prizes need to be at least $100 worth of value to be interesting. For this group, there could be a few race entries on the table to be raffled away.

cheers,

mmmm ..... lunch.

"Each E-Bd Rep takes the scheduling desires of their particular clubs to the meeting."

As I belong to META, and our club is not involved with the schedule, can someone enlighten me as to how this process works?
I am asking in all sincerity and not taking pot shots at any club.

Is it the Executive or BOD of that club that decides and then it's done, or is it determined by a majority of club members, be it driver or volunteer?

As Rick said, we have an embarrassment of riches in the PNW with the number and quality of tracks.
But there is one sanctioning body that pretty much has it's road race discipline decimated. This demise had been talked about for quite a few years and it was a slow death.

So what will we do, should do, to avoid a slippery slope.
So what will we do, should do, to help keep our clubs viable and healthy?

I'm voting with Karen, Mike and Randy also seems to be a good choice.

The typical way it is done is each club starts negotiations with the track to find out what dates are available. Usually the track expects the dates to stay pretty close to the previous years dates but there is some negotiation and movement based on demand from other renters.

We then take those dates and discuss it among the IRDC Board with an eye towards trying not to interfere with traditional dates for other Conference clubs, conflicts that will cost us participation and/or volunteers, additional conflicts with other orginizations like vintage or pro races at other local tracks, and schedule spacing that might decrease attendance. Not an easy process!

Once we have gotten the IRDC Board to agree to the schedule we distribute our preliminary dates to the other clubs to see if any conflicts have been created. A bit of horse trading typically happens during this process because sometimes a track only has one week-end available in a month and the club involved will have not only a conflict but no real ability to move that date. I would say a decent portion of the conflicts are shaken out in this process, which is good because the tracks generally want a signed contract well before the final acceptance is recieved from the E-board meetings. I would say that the individual clubs really do try to be as concientious of each other as possible during this early shakeout period in my experience.

When two clubs are stuck on the same date and there is no immediately available or desired movement from either club, it goes to the Fall E-Board meetings where the delegates of the five member clubs discuss, haggle, cajole, and finally vote to resolve schedule difficulites so the drivers of Conference can start planning their next Summer.

It's a little more complicated than that, but you get the general idea.

Thanks Rick.

Do I bring aspirin or scotch to the meeting......or boxing gloves jousting lances? (just kidding)