I moved to Pueblo, Colorado about a month or so ago. I was set to go to my first SCCA event at Pikes Peak in mid-July, a Double Rational. About a week before the event it was abruptly cancelled. They had about 20 entries, FOR A DOUBLE RATIONAL. So I did my first event in the Rockies, a NASA event at High Plains Raceway, last weekend. It was quite a good event. My first SCCA race is now August 18-19 also at High Plains. Last night I attended a board meeting for Continental Divide Region (My new region) to see what was happening. There is talk of Aug 18/19 High Plains event being cancelled, and CDR is talking about canceling our SCCA event at Pueblo in October. Then this morning I got an email from my old region, Oregon, and they are canceling their August club race at Portland.

Folks, this looks like the beginning of the end of the world as SCCA knows it. A lot of people last night were talking about how bad the economy is and that is reason for no-one racing SCCA. I say horse pucky. Other stuff is going strong. My wife and I spend most weekends riding our Polaris side-by-side ATV, first in Idaho, now in Colo. There is a guided tour that will be in a canyon close La Junta each weekend in Sept and Oct. I just got the app to sign up and 2 weekends are already full. I take my grand-kids to Disney every Christmas, and it is already hard to get rooms in Orlando in December, and it is only August. Disney is setting records for attendance right now. I've done tons of touristy stuff since I've been here in Colo, and Pikes Peak, Royale Gorge, Sand Dunes National Park, Garden of the Gods, Cripple Creek, and you can't stir the people with a stick.

We had better get our act together, or we will be turning our SCCA cars in coffee tables.

And to be real honest, there ain't much activity on these forums either.

Bill Seifert

Civic SI race car.

Forum Software upgrade coming soon... hoping SCCA will still be around by the time we go live! :)

Agree... SCCA Participation suffering, but I believe they can pull it out!

Dave

Dave, I hope the heck you are right. For the first 23 years of my SCCA life I lived in Nashville, Tn, the nearest track that did Nationals was Atlanta, when I belonged to SE, then Memphis when I was in MidWest. Then I moved to Idaho, and the nearest track was Miller at 281 miles. Now in Colorado Pueblo is 7 miles from my house, Pikes Peak is 33 miles from my house, and High Plains 130 miles, and all I see now is cancelled races. Bummer.

Bill

I wonder how long until the SCCA has to start looking at consolidation of some of the Divisions. When you have divisions like Midwest with an average of 65 and Norpac with an average of 76. Plus Divisions canceling races due to low turn out.

Cheyne

Yeah, one of the guys at CDR board meeting last night races FF, and just got back from the Double Rational at Miller, which had 45 cars. I was at the first Miller Rational in '10 and it had over 100 cars, and I remember people thinking that was a low entry. Miller was my closest track when I lived in Idaho, and entries there come from RM, NORPAC, and SOPAC usually. About consolidating divisions, I remember when RM was in MidWest, and there was no Great Lakes, but I'm still not sure what the answer is. When I went to Drivers School at Savannah in 1985 there was SCCA, and that was it. Now there is PCA, PBOC, POC, BMWCCA, NASA NARRA, Time Attack, LeMons, ChumpCar, and God knows what else. How in the world do all these clubs get workers?

Bill

Bill,

The way most other race groups survive is they do HPDE and/or TT along with their races to get car count and $$$$ The local NASA group I run TT with usually has no more than 30 race entries and 25 TT entries but their bread and butter is the DE groups. CFR my local SCCA region is blessed with good #'s of racers but even they have started some PDX events along with the racers.

Peter

The answer - we all build B-Spec Honda fits! OK, any B-Spec car will work...

SCCA has reduced the required events for runoffs participation to the point where you can qualify in 2 weekends. In doing this, they deny the regions entries needed to afford to hold events. What did they think was gonna happen?

dubya

So true. The reason I didn't race in 2011 was that at our first race at Thunderhill there were 3 of us in SSC, which is not great, but at least there was come competition. After that in the 5 National races in NORPAC I would have towed 4,500 miles and raced by myself. Now here in Rocky Mountain, the last Double Rational in Colo at Pikes Peak was cancelled, and then Miller in August had 47 entries for Utah's only Rational. Maybe instead of letting you run the Runoffs with 2 weekends and counting your best 7 finishes, they should require 7 National races to go. At least people wanting to go to the Runoffs would show up. There has to be an answer, I'm just not sure what it is.

I ran my first W2W race with the SCCA in Memphis this spring, I must say I was very impressed. I have run several races with NASA in the Mid South Region supporting them because they are a great bunch of folks and they run at Memphis, St. Louis, and we had Nashville but now its shut down. Both organizations are good, I must say I am worried about the new Mid South Region of NASA, at the last race in Memphis in July we had 6 race cars, and not a real good turnout for HPDE, and only 2 in Time Trials. A lot of people in this part of the country love Barber- myself included, but NASA hasn't had a race there in sometime now. I am going to run with the SCCA there on labor day weekend, I am glad the SCCA is able to run there. I sure hope the economy turns around for everybody, and we can get both organizations going strong.

I'm glad that Memphis is making a comeback. Is St Louis back in business? I hate it that Nashville is gone. I never liked the track all that much, but the double regional always seemed to do well. Even if the Nashville track were to come back, I don't think NASA could come back there, because 6 or 7 years ago some NASA promoter took off owing the Superspeedway a ton of money.

I think more than the economy, a big problem is that there are too many sanctioning bodies. There are only so many drivers, and when you try to spread them around to SCCA, NASA, PCA, Lemons, Crapcan, Chumpcar, PBOC, etc the fields in any one group goes down.

Here in Colorado there are a lot of racing groups, and it doesn't seem like any are doing well. I'm glad you like SCCA, they do a good job, they have been doing for a long time. Maybe some of the groups need to join forces.

The restructuring of SS and T classes led me to turn the SSB Civic into an ice racer. SCCA governing bodies seem "corporate" and out of touch. If it wasn't for Solo and the friends I've made there, I wouldn't have anything to do with SCCA at all. Our local autocross region decided to be "independent" and not be an SCCA club at all. There doesn't seem to be much advantage to being involved with the SCCA and it smacks of big business that is there for their agenda and doesn't reflect on the membership's needs.

I think gearing the rules for the few folks that are in the club to win the runoffs is wrong. The class rules should be geared for for Miatas that cost 20k not 60k and corvettes that cost 80k not 300k, etc, etc. The club needs to return to a vision of making racing fun and affordable. Let the guys with deep pockets and/or a burning desire to win at all cost run pro either SCCA or otherwise.

great post. the problems are several IMO. Number one, you don't base rules on pro rules set concepts. At all. Ever. Pro Rules are designed for reasons that are totally inappropriate for amateur racing.

An amateur rules set (and sanctioning body by its conduct) must do several things:

1) focus on absolute minimum entry and participation costs, no matter what. rules errors in this area drive over 75% of the cost of SCCA racing, and I do not believe that is an exaggeration.

2) focus on vehicles that appeal to car enthusiasts and sponsors. rules errors in this area eliminate almost all SCCA classes from consideration.

3) focus on preservation of stable, interesting classes to justify long term investment, and encourage regular new membership. rules errors in this area, largely driven by changes caused by bad rules to start with, and catering for bad reasons to existing influential members, eliminates the SCCA from consideration.

4) frankly, the scca should completely reinvent itself when it comes to marketing and spectators. it would work with a little capital and elbow grease.

i make plenty of money, and have more interest in racing than almost anyone. but the SCCA's club rules are so incredibly, absolutely horrible that i can't find a single class that i can consider even the remotest of possibilities to run. I'm not going to spend $100k to run a miata or little crapmobile, and i'm not going to spend $300k racing a car that should cost $50k to run.

This ^^ right here summarizes exactly how I feel. I am basically out of SS/T racing now after averaging more than 10 events a year for most of the 12 years I have been racing (15 weekends last year alone). I took a year break once before and sat on some money to decide whether to even come back to SCCA national racing in SS/T and I am doing the same thing again now. I cannot for the life of me make an informed decision with money that is not throw away to re-enter SS/T and I have almost zero interest in other classes that are available. This leaves me looking at alternatives (I am) or sitting on the sideline (I am not) until I decide to take on another hobby (I am not yet). I am in the camp of NOT being a car constructor and here we are in nearly September and everything is mud in my eyes for nationals that start in nearly 4 months in the Southeast. I need almost that entire amount of time available to acquire, build and prep a car to make the January nationals. For me personally I know my window of time that is too late for 2013 and it is fast approaching. I previously made a decision to enter a class with the season in my area half over and I am never doing that again. For me it is simple, I have discretionary income for racing, however I CANNOT afford to make a bad purchase decision that could get hosed overnight. If that happened I would have to sit out several years due to a bad decision.

Re: The economy. I wonder if I am alone, but I don't buy that the economy is to blame for any substantial part of the declining numbers of racers in SCCA. If this were the case, all the other organizations wouldn't be loving their double digit growth, instead they all would be declining, not taking market share away or increasing their own numbers. I believe a large number of people in racing are some sort of business people or professional white collared. Put the "economy crying" in your business sense calculator for a moment when the facts are the facts....

It is incredibly interesting to me also that a marketing company was hired with "our club's" funds to examine a number of things to get things on track, provide feedback etc.. I find it incredible that said marketing company isn't directly reaching out to the members of "the club" to inquire (either through a survey or other means) to ask the members how we want our club run or what is not going well. I think that since "our club" hired said marketing company they should have laid out what the objectives are and then the results should be shared with the club.

Again in the business world, many times I have hired consulting firms to examine any number of things. That has gone well when the company really used all means to collect data and in the essence of transparency all of that data was shared. As you can imagine it has gone terrible when all they did was ask leadership (myself included) what wasn't going well and what we got was what we already knew and nothing changed ;) Even when Bill talks about the good ol days of racing in bigger fields in SS in the Southeast - if you look at each and every guy that was racing back then, almost all of them are not casualties of the economy one bit (just sayin). Ask them why they are not around anymore is a good place to start.

Smartest 2 sentences ever uttered on this forum:

1. Vote with your check book (obviously this is happening somewhat drastically already and in large danger of continuing to get worse)

2. Vote with your vote when BOD positions are open for your area. Ask potential candidates to openly discuss how they feel about topics that get laid out here often. If you can search this forum software and look elsewhere you will see where that previously happened and multiple BOD members were not renewed ;) Just on the T-1 Corvette mayhem regardless of how I feel about it (I think it is actually positive given where things are) I find it interesting that a BOD vote of 13-0 occurred to specifically consolidate T-1, T-2, T-3, SSB, SSC classes while clearly faltering classes were left alone and not even under consideration even ones that are in bad health with much less lap time to make up in consolidation. T-2, SSC and T3 have received a bit of a high hard one on this front. If you look closer you will see clear signs of why that might be the case. All done under a less classes are needed umbrellas, yet we are still at the same number when the dust settles..

Lastly, it is easy to offer an opinion from an armchair QB position. I do think changes are needed or the crash course of declining racers and membership in SCCA will continue and in the near future we will all be watching SCCA sell itself or divest or merge with another body or dwindle to non-existence. I don't envy the CRB or the BOD on trying to do something. What I don't particularly like is that the BOD loves to say they are not the ones driving the changes, the CRB is proposing the changes and they are merely approving them, and the CRB from previous tent meetings and conversations on this topic in years past says they are only executing based on the BOD's directives. It can't be both, it has to be one or the other. Who is wearing the "R"? In neither case though is this an easy mountain to climb and for that I am still appreciative that volunteers (no matter where I like them all or not) are doing the best that they can with at least pure intentions of improving SCCA.

2 cents, you can flush it.

Bill,

HPR Double Regional, restricted Double National, Time Trails weekend is a go and always has been. It's what we do! Wish people wouldn't spread rumors.

JIMbob

BTW,

The Double Rational at HPR (Last Chance Rational) in two weeks, is in NO danger of being cancelled either. Cancel, that's a bad word.

JIMbob

Jim,

That is great news. Unfortunately, my car won't be ready for this coming weekend, but I will be at the Double Rational in 2 weeks.

Bill

BillSeifert wrote:
I'm glad that Memphis is making a comeback. Is St Louis back in business? I hate it that Nashville is gone. I never liked the track all that much, but the double regional always seemed to do well. Even if the Nashville track were to come back, I don't think NASA could come back there, because 6 or 7 years ago some NASA promoter took off owing the Superspeedway a ton of money.

I think more than the economy, a big problem is that there are too many sanctioning bodies. There are only so many drivers, and when you try to spread them around to SCCA, NASA, PCA, Lemons, Crapcan, Chumpcar, PBOC, etc the fields in any one group goes down.

Here in Colorado there are a lot of racing groups, and it doesn't seem like any are doing well. I'm glad you like SCCA, they do a good job, they have been doing for a long time. Maybe some of the groups need to join forces.

I am glad that Memphis is going because it is only an hours drive for me. St. Louis is going again NASA Mid South had an event there this year, but I could not make it. I never liked Nashville that much either because the transitions are terrible and a little to autocross like off the ovals. BTW according to NASA, Memphis is planning to build a new Road Course that will not utilize the dragstrip. That is a good thing because when the dragstrip gets wet, the day is essentially over, I can't tell you how slick it is when it gets wet.

To kinda quote Mark Twain, my report of Rocky Mtn SCCA's death or SCCA's death in general may be an exaggeration. After reading Jim Leithauser's answer, Colorado SCCA's RE Michelle McColl called me and assured me that Colorado SCCA was indeed alive and well. I am sure glad to hear that. And when both the RE and Asst RE contact me, I sure believe it. Michelle, I hope I spelled your name correctly.

Beretta, I sure remember Memphis in the wet. When I came off the last turn, I would shift into neutral and coast to the end of the burn out area, before I dared to even put the car into gear, much less touch the gas pedal. Even if I tried to just push the clutch in and coast, it would wiggle most of the way down the straight. It was scary.