Most of the venues we race at are large fields, usually requiring 5 worker stations to cover the course adaquately, with no less than 2 workers at each station. That's 10 people, plus two in the bus for timing and scoring makes 12. Now, we need that for both run groups, that makes 24, and one of the perks of being event chair is that you are not required to work the course, so we arrive at the golden number of 25. My understanding is that this is still not enough entrants for the club to break even on costs, but that is not our main focus, running a safe event is. So 25 is the absolute minumum number of people we need to run an event, and we really need all of them to show up, and hopefully we will also have a few walk ups, the more the merrier.
We cancelled the school in March because of lack of instructors and students signed up. The rallyx the next day ended up getting called later on account of a LOT of rain. The last thing we need to do is tear the mess out of one of our regular venues and end up on bad terms with the land owner. It's not about having to clean your car and deal with mud, it's about having a good long term relationship with the land owners, and respecting that they allow is to use their property with the good faith that we will not tear it up.
There seems to be some confusion over the calling of the July event. I am not sure why, but when Chris posted on the 4th that we were not going forward with the July event due to too few preregistered participants, and to sign up for the next event in August to make sure that event would happen, that message didn't seem to get through. Possibly it is because we did nto get the word to the webmaster to pull the prereg page soon enough, so it looked like it was still on. People were still posting asking for a decision and due to the holiday I did not check the forums for a few days. By then there was a lot of confusion and frustration and when I tried to explain that the event was indeed already cancelled it seems it was taken as a last minute call, when it wazs just a case of ill communication. This was unintentional and unfortunate, and you have my sincere apology for that.
So, we arrive at this week, with 11 days to go until the September event and we have a whopping 13 people prerregistered. This is a holiday weekend, attendance is probably down because a lot of people have family commitments or are travelling. It seems extremely unlikely that we are going to suddenly have 12 more people sign up in the 4 days left until the "deadline" to make the call about the event. Calling the event 4 days early made sense as it would possibly allow people time to change their plans for the holiday, to be with family and friends since the race was not likely to happen at that point.
Why aren't we getting more participants? I'm sure there's a lot of factors that contribute to that, not the least of which is the economy. People don't have the same disposable income to spend on racing. Rallyx is noticably harder on the cars than autox, and more time intensive cleaning the cars afterward. It's easy to see how some people may have reduced the number of events they are ging to or just written off rallyx for this season all together.
What do we need to do? Well, we need to get more people to participate, obviously. We are not as concerned with making money as we are with running a safe event, so we need people who are actually planning to come to preregister. We need to have a positive attitude that while it is frustrating that attendance is down, we are all volunteering our time to make sure that THSCC offers as many events as it can safely provide for it's remaining participants.
ChrisSuich wrote:
Nicely said Ash.
Chris Suich
RallyX VP #2
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