RE NEWS – MID YEAR

We are in July and have completed 4 Road Race events and have 3 to go, so we want to give you a mid-year update on where the SFR Road Race Region.

The following is a recap of our goals and our assessment of how we’re doing mid-year:

Goal: Get our Road Race financial losses to manageable level. Over the prior year’s Road Racing was operationally losing around $300,000 a year. Road Racing was living off the $225-$250,000 Thunderhill dividend, which may or may not be okay, except our Entries and Worker counts were continually dropping at an ever-increasing rate. Our goal was to reduce Road Racing operational losses to $125,000, fund the losses with half the Thunderhill dividend and put the balance into trying to rebuild the Road Race program.

Mid-year update: We made the hard decision to shut down the SFR office and contract Thunderhill for office support. This was painful in two regards. One we had to layoff our staff, and two we had to train a new Thunderhill person to take on duties they had never done before. The Jan-Jun 2024 cost was $83,050, the Jan-Jun 2025 cost was $44,754 (after office shut done severance costs).

We had significant cost increases at Sonoma and bigger than significant increases at Laguna.

Operational financially here is where we are so far:
– Drivers School = Loss $24,798
– Sonoma = Loss $5,744
– Thunderhill Major/Regional = Profit $31,314
– Thunderhill Regional = Loss $25,243
– Laguna Regional = $20,000 (estimate, still getting info in)
– Jan – June Event Loss = 4,471 + office cost $44,754 = Loss year to date =$49,225

So given what we believe will play out for the next three events we believe we will be able to meet our goal of a loss for 2025 of $125,000.

Goal: Bring in new groups/entries to increase our entry counts

Mid-year Update: We would say this has worked out great. Big thanks go out to Greg Hoff and Blake Tatum for their success at beating the drum and bringing in either new outside groups or bring in entries from out of our Region. We’ve learned a lot about what and how to communicate with outside drivers and Greg and Blake brought many new faces into our Region.

Goal: Start Worker stipend program to keep and attract our SFR Workers

Mid-year update: The cost of travel and lodging were preventing SFR members from volunteering at our Road Races. To ease the financial burden, we implemented a $100/day stipend program. SFR Treasure Bill Booth and our accountant Rhina Miller have been processing the stipend program. While the stipend program is available to all, I do want to comment and thank a significant number of Workers do not take the Stipend for reasons that are their own. We do not have data that says the stipend program has increased our Worker counts, we feel that it’s the right thing to do and over time will make a difference.
Goal: Do follow up phone calls with Driver School graduates. SFR has not had a formal follow-up phone call process with our DS graduates.

Mid-year update: Linda Rogaski, Gregg Hoff, Bill Booth, and I called the 2025 DriverSchool graduates to ask

1) what they thought of the school, 2) what we could do to make it better, 3) what’s their plan and does it include racing with SFR.
Almost 100% thought the school was great. There were comments like “the most fun driving weekend I’ve had” , to “I learned a lot and really liked the instructors”. Improvement ideas ranged from “need more time between sessions to work on my car” to “did not like threshold barking, it flat spotted my tire”. All good input to make our school better.
As far as participation with SFR, some were going to do a race or two this year, some were either building a car or looking to buy one. The majority said they were considering the cost of road racing and would need to find the budget. The bottom line is we did not get the “I love it and will be running all the events”

Our conclusion was we run a solid Drivers School, and we still need to do work on how to find and motivate school candidates to race with SFR. We need to work to improve participation.

Goal: New useful Website
Mid-year update: Thanks to Blake Tatum this one is complete in the first phase. We wanted a web site that was simple to use, had a more modern feel, and held the information needed by our Club members and we accomplished that. The first phase was to have schedule links, results, points, supps, the Wheel, shops and current news easily available.
Goal: Get more track time
Mid-year update: Starting at our first Sonoma event we went away from our traditional fixed time schedule and implemented a session followed by process. The concept is if we don’t need the time between the session let’s get to green and save the time for when we need a gap. This is one of those simple ideas that’s very hard to do. Drivers have been used to the fixed time schedule and there has been some rethinking needed.

We started producing a “session time estimate” document which Drivers said was very helpful. In addition, we have set up a txt system through MSR to alert Drivers when and what group is on track.

We want to thank our Steward leaders Jim Rogaski and Kevin Cullen and their Steward teams that have successfully worked to make this new concept come out ok. Also, thanks to the Workers in Race Control who make the sessions flow throughout the day and must contend with track clean up (both from dirt and cars!). We appreciate you all!!

Goal: How do we control PA costs? Seems like a simple thing, some wires and an amplifier, but the cost of renting the PA system at Laguna ($7,000) and Sonoma is now way past significant.
Mid-year update: As noted above, we have continued to work on a texting process offered by MSR. We started at Sonoma and adjusted our process with the focus of not having announce at Laguna. We now have a protocol for the texting process. It’s not there yet, but we did successfully make it with 250 entries at Laguna with no PA system, so we think we’re on the right track. We had positive feedback, but also some negative like “I don’t want to look at my phone all the time”, and “I did not opt in for receiving texts”. Not sure how to solve every issue, but we’re working on it and open to any ideas you might have, so feedback is important.
Goal: To publish schedules earlier.
Mid-year update: This has had mixed results. We have published the schedule earlier as was set out in our goals. But we have made changes when the event date has gotten closer. Why?

1. Most of our drivers wait till the last two weeks prior to an event to enter.
2. Working to provide the most track time to Drivers
3. Providing safe/practical run groupings.

In the days gone by, we would publish the schedule, not adjust, and would frequently end up with one run group of 6-8 cars and another with 30-35.
We are trying to solve the issue by

1. We’re testing a tiered pricing format for the upcoming Sonoma event with a pricing incentive if you enter approx. 30 days out.
2. We hope that by talking about the issue and bringing it to everyone’s attention it will help educate that waiting till the last-minute hurts our Club Racing program.

Goal: New more interesting Trophies
Mid-year update: Bill Booth took on the task of finding higher quality trophies at a cost at least matching what we have had over the last few years. The feedback we’ve received has been very positive. Bill came up with the concept of three trophy versions, one for each track, which can be produced in large quantities. Then we have trophy plates made for each event based on entries. Overall, it working well, thanks Bill for your efforts and good ideas.
What’s Next
We will continue trying new ideas, keeping our eyes open to bring in new racers, working to make our race program work better.

Joe Briggs has helped me set up a Zoom call with CAL Club and Oregon to review our schedules for next year with the goal of attempting to make our schedules flow better.

One thing to educate our SFR members on. The Regions only “influence” the scheduling of the Super Tours and Majors. Much of that comes from National. Also, Oregon still has to contend with what the final dates will be for their supported Pro event.

On August 6th we held a SFR Board meeting.

The goals for the meeting were:

1. To set the 2026 Road Race schedule.
2. To review where we are financially and confirm we are on target for our projected $125,000 loss.
3. If we agree on #2 then develop a budget for spending some of the remaining Thunderhill Dividend money on ideas to rebuild our Road Racing program.
4. Discuss adjusting our Bylaws to insure funds collected by each of the Autocross groups can only be used by the same group.

Thank you for your continued support and as always,

See you at the Track!

Mike Smith