Anthony Tabacco wrote:... We are down about 200 entries total from our conservatively modest '12 projections across the 16 sanctioned events we hosted this year, but most telling is that these past seasons, 60% of our racers entered only a single weekend double with two separate sanction numbers (keeps a regional comp license current) and an additional 20% entered two weekend doubles (keeps a national current). That's 8 out of 10 racers doing the minimum necessary to keep that card in their wallet.
tony
Maybe raising entry fees and then giving money away at random isn't working, for one thing.
Or having special weekends with extra races for the groups that already have strong participation.
Or dropping groups for certain weekends.
Maybe it's time to get out of the data mine and take a look around. The region has been shrinking since before the economy went bad. Now other groups are growing and adding dates to their schedule, but SF Region only has 7 club racing weekends covering 7 months of the year.
I would be interested in seeing how our club racing participation compares with auto-x.
Our promotion of club racing consists of free booths at pro races and a series of gimmicks that are primarily targeted at getting people to bring their friends to the track.
The scope of our club racing events are so narrow (no time trials, driver's schools, etc.) that you really have to be committed (real race car, driver's suit, etc.) to participate.
Then we do things to shoot ourselves in the foot. Like have driver's school only once a year in the winter. People don't want to wait, so we accept licenses from other organizations. They let drivers work up to licenses gradually, so the initial cost of entry can be spread out. How many potential SCCA racers go to NASA (or Porsche or BMW clubs) and get their licenses and never come back to SCCA? (A very small portion of our SCCA school graduates actually race very much).
Thanks to the limited local SCCA season, we are getting exposed to other organization's events. I agree the quality of racing and organization doesn't compare, but they are getting the 20-somethings and 30-somethings and the tuner shops running a couple cars to show off their stuff....