At Saturday's ET Championship Series Race, Jim held a meeting with all the drivers and shared the following information/changes.
The ET Series races are all losing money -- between employee costs, insurance, utilities, purse payouts and advertising, there is substantially more money going out the door than coming in. The problem is there are not enough cars and spectators to support the cost of putting on the event. To reduce the amount of these losses we will be implementing the following changes, effective immediately. Gate open time will move back one hour to 4:00 pm, time trials will start at 5:00 pm. Time trials will be reduced to 2 rounds, with eliminations immediately following, so the overall time frame of the event will be reduced. Any class with less than 4 cars will not receive winner or runner-up trophies. While we are not yet changing the payout schedule, that may also be necessary in the future.
As with any business you cannot operate at a loss for any period of time and expect to keep the doors open. The best way all of you can help is to encourage other racers to start attending events, introducing potential sponsors to the facility, and increasing the spectator base -- encourage your friends/family/acquaintances to spend a day at the track. We appreciate the support and commitment of our current base of racers that show up every week, there just aren't enough of you currently to make the dollars balance.
We have had to make a large number of manual corrections to points this year, because racers are running their cars under a different competition number than the number they signed up for points with. YOU MUST HAVE THE SAME NUMBER ON YOUR CAR AS YOU USED FOR POINTS SIGN-UP. If you aren't sure what that number is, then look at what's listed on the points page. From this point forward we will not make corrections for this. In addition, you can no longer run in a different class and have your points transferred (this can only be done through the second points race).
Beginning with the ET Championship Series race on 6/23/07, we will return to the late afternoon start times. Gates will open at 3:00, tech 3:30, racing begins at 4:30. Please pass the word to your fellow racers.
We are planning on running the final rounds from last Friday's rain out this coming Friday (June 8th). Listed below are the competitors by class that are in the remaining rounds:
Sport Compact -- Jim Blazer & Dustin Shermer
Street DOT -- Josh Allphin, Mike Maroney, Paul Breedlove, Valdez Florentine
Motorcycle -- Nick Kessler & Khalub Doyle