First I need to thank everyone for making 2013 such a great season. Thanks to the executive, turn workers and especially the safety crew. Having made frequent use of them this year, I have a much greater appreciation of their commitment. I'd also like to thank all the folks in Open Wheel, from Vee to Libre, for the comradery and on-track professionalism. Most importantly, I'd like to thank the boys in Formula Ford for all the help they've given me over these two years, Marty Knoll and Jim Keller for the excellent winter rebuild, and all the ontrack help from everyone in the class, especially Alan McColl, who kept me in it when things were looking grim. What other sport can you plow into the wall at turn 3 in two consecutive races and think it was the greatest season ever!

Which brings me to the topic of this post, and something I obviously and sorely need: practice days. Last year we only had three practice days. I would like to see the club schedule more practice days for 2014. Coming from karting, we paid $600 for membership for the year. This entitled each member to a key to the track gate, where we could kart anytime we wanted, 365 days/year, providing we had a spotter. I know this is not at all possible at Mission, but it would be nice to have 4-5 track days available for 2014. I suppose this would only be viable if there were enough demand out there for practice days. I'd like to get some idea if there is any interest in more practice days or am I just a voice in the wilderness. Any comments?

This item came up at the club meeting last night, which is the best place to have discussions like these.

There are two main issues with practice days, the biggest of which is not having enough volunteers to come and make the day happen, operationally.  Corner marshals, safety, pre-grid and control.

The other issue is the cost.  While your suggestion is creative, I'm not sure the balance of drivers/members, who cannot come out to practice because of work or other issues around week days, would be happy about paying such a high membership fee for something they cannot participate in.

We also have a very limited number of Fridays that we are allotted by our landlord.  Our rental customers scoop those up.  We are guaranteed to make money from a rental day, whereas we risk losing a lot of money should a practice day have a poor turnout.

We will be having two practice days in 2014, opening weekend and the Labour Day weekend.  We may consider scheduling another in advance of the weekend the big F.A.R.T. FV race is held, but that would be subject to track availability, volunteer availability and enough participation.

I believe the Vintage Club intends to have a practice day open to all drivers in advance of their race weekend.

I think the issue that you would have is there are a lot of memebers who don't have race licenses and would not be taking advantage of the practice days and would object to the higher membership fee.

As Steve mentioned, we also have the issue of day availability and volunteer availability. As nice as it would be to have more practice days, unless we had more people step up to help run them we can't do it logistically.

As much as I would love to see more practice days, I could not support an increased membership fee to make it happen.

Just my 2 cents.

Marc

Speaking as an active racer who'd like to be MORE active, I would definitely be willing to pay more for more practice days; be that an increase in my membership fees, or simply more for the day itself.

And furthermore, I'd be willing to pay with TIME.

If we have a shortage of volunteers to man the track, then why not offer people the option of spending a certain amount of the day working on track in return for time to practice?

Surely it's got to be possible for the day to be divided up such that the open wheel drivers can work the turns for the closed wheel drivers and then after lunch, the reverse.