February 9, 2025
Hi Everyone, we are over a month out from our first event. There is a lot going on with Drivers School a few weeks out and our first Regional at Sonoma.
Something I want to be very straight forward about. What I write in RE NEWS is 100% public and maybe reprinted and used wherever anyone would like to use it.
That includes Facebook sites. A criticism from some members of our Region was not enough communication, so go for it! And please do not criticized those who pass our information along.
Free Thunderhill Test Day
Too bad it rained on Saturday! We had about 110 signed up counting the HDPE groups. The “open test” count dropped a lot but interesting enough the HPDE groups hung in there. Most of the HPDE were autocross folks and they had a blast. They did not give a darn about the rain. It was fun to see them. And they were good, I watched many of them going through T3 getting sideways and nicely getting it under control going into T4. First time we advertised to autocross for the free test day. It will definitely be a repeat!
Track Contracts
You are free to tell whoever wants to know that we have signed contracts for all our 2025 track events. We have paid the deposits and in fact the contract at Sonoma requires we pay the whole event amount prior to the actual event and Bill Booth (our treasure) has it scheduled and ready to pay. So you know all Sonoma rental contracts have a 90 no fault cancel Sonoma can exercise. The March event is now within 90 days. We have no reason to believe they will do that for our second event, but just wanted to be straight with you. The Laguna contract was signed, and the deposit was sent last December. The Thunderhill contracts are signed. FYI, Our new Event Build Timeline shows us starting to work the 2026 schedule July, which will help us with good event scheduling communication
SFR BOARD Meeting
We had an all-day in person Board meeting last Thursday January 30th. We finished our 2025 budget.
Here are some highlights:
– In my last RE NEWS I told you about our Road Racing $300K loss for 2024. We are not trying to get to a profitable program all in one year. What we are trying to do is cut our losses to around half that amount, so with the Thunderhill dividend we will have $75-$100K to spend on
1) making our racing programs better, 2) marketing with the goal to rebuild our racing programs.
We established 2025 Entry Fees. Not trying to make anyone into an accountant, but most of our expenses (track cost, track services, etc. are fixed no matter how many entries we get). So that means our projections of entry counts are key, followed by how many we actually get. So, we did our best to project our entries and what our entry fees need to be. We have tightened our belt in our expense side of things by tuning how we manage our event processes. We have a team of SFR Specialty Chiefs that have worked hard to adjust processes and spending, we all owe a “thank you” to each of them. At the end of the day the entry fees did not increase as much as our base track costs, but through good operations and decent entry counts we will come out on target.
After our meeting, I happen to find a 2017 SFR Supp Regulations listing 2017 entry fees. From 2017 if you adjust for general cost of living it would put our 2025 about where we are. Not saying increasing fees is good, just saying I don’t think we’re way out there. We now need all of you to enter our events!!!!!
Test Days prior to our Road Race weekend will be run by SFR as non SCCA sanctioned days. You will be able to sign up for the optional Test Day on MSR as part of your Race Event entry process. SFR is running the test day in this format so SFR can keep the profit margin that was going to the tracks. Track services will be provided by the tracks with the exception of our Race Administration team (thank you) who will now make it possible to register on Friday morning for the Test Day and the Race Event all at one time!
Road Race Track Time
We’ve worked with Stewards Kevin Cullen and Jim Rogaski to run the events less down time by using the “follow by” process. They are behind the concept and understand why it’s important. We also have a session tracking sheet they are going to update on every session so we can download how things went and see what can be done to make it smoother/better. We’re having open straight forward dialog, on how to get more track time to drivers and we feel good moving ahead on that goal.
We have scheduled Race Group Drivers meeting for every event except the Thunderhill Majors. The first Drivers meeting will be at Group 4 at Sonoma on Saturday at lunch. Note, the Drivers meeting is where you get to say what’s on your mind and give us ideas on how to make things better.
SFR Web Site Improvements
We have the technical side of where the web sites live all transferred and stable. It looks like we made it with no interruptions. Blake Tatum and I met with a design person last week and by the middle of next week we should have a wireframe design to review. On this first pass we are going for super practical for all of us as users. Practical means items easy to find/read like schedules, entry registration, results, SFR News, the Wheel, Worker information.
Currently the Autocross groups all run their own sites so the SFRCCA.ORG site just provides a link. For this first pass we are going to leave that as is, but we are open to making adjustments in future passes.
Thanks and see you at the track,
Mike
