July 11th Rallycross has been cancelled.
While we are glad to see enthusiasm amongst fellow Rallcrossers, as VP’s this is a hard decision to make.
Unfortunately this event did not have enough preregistered participants to justify the expense of holding the event when we checked the entry list with little more than a week to go until the event. We don't want to cancel events, and we are glad to see so many people expressing interest, but not at the last minute. Unfortunately it does take time, people and money to make an event happen. If it is looking like the club will be losing money to hold an event, or if there will not be enough people participating to safely work the course, we put the word out to try to drum up more participation so that the event does not get cancelled. At some point though, we do have to make the call that there is not enough interest to justify the expense, and with a week to go we decided that there was just not enough people preregistered to hold this event safely and without losing money.
In the past we have not had a specific number announced as a "goal" for participation, and that policy is being addressed so that participants won't be left hanging until the last minute. The logistics however, dictate that we commit to holding an event before the week of the event, in order to arrange for insurance and bus transport, and conveniences such as catering and port-a-john delivery. In recent months we have definitely been pushing things to the wire so that events will still happen, but this is setting a precedent that really cannot continue. Cancelling an event is disappointing to us and the people who have already signed up, but we cannot run an event if we don't have enough people to safely work the course, and we can't wait until the last second to make the decision.
With the participation and interest that we do have in the Rallycross program, we are asking you to use the preregistration process so that we can determine interest in a specific event and we need more people to volunteer to chair the events. The last thing we want to do is cancel events, but it seems like more often we are having to resort to begging people to participate in the process of making events happen. We would like to see more people volunteer to chair events and preregister for them, before we get to the point that we are discussing the potential cancellation of an event.
We welcome your thoughts and suggestions. We have three weeks until the August 1st event and we only have 8 preregistrants, We are still without event chairs for any of the other three remaining events this season.
Please use this link now to preregister for the August 1st event if you plan to participate in it.
http://www.thscc.com/rallycross/prereg_rallyx.html
Can we count on you to make sure these events will happen?
Rally X VPs
Ash Nelson
Chris Suich