I heard the presentation too John.
Pity I can't put a face with the name ... i wanted to thank you for elec advice you gave me, and pass on my admiration of the pics i have seen of your car interior, especailly wood facia.
Problem with these boards sometimes, all we have are handles ...
McSorley Gruppe II beckons sometime soon :D
I missed Jim Garfield as well (veteran of McSorley Gruppe I :D ) ... cell phone reception sucks there and we never did meet up.

Karl.

real shame
Jersey Shore Region has been forced to abandon our 15 year tradition of LRP DE the third Thursday in Sept because of the cost of getting the track for one day. We are now relegated to combine hosting events with other regions at other tracks.
The proposed club will probably have the same effect on the other small regions.
Bill K

Raise your fees. We (Hudson Valley Region) currently do the second Thursday in September, and we have fewer than 250 members. It's expensive to run a racetrack, and nobody is getting rich at Lime Rock. Barber is well off, but that's because of his school franchise, which he sold for a reporeted $40 million. And I knew him when he was behind on his rent...

On the issue of fees, that's one of the points Skip addressed. As it currently stands, the costs of running the race track all get passed along to the school and the various clubs. As a result, DE and Club race fees have skyrocketed, and a lot of clubs just can't use the track because it's getting too expensive to run a DE.

The hope with the "Club" is that you have a membership base that will help support the track, allowing the pricing to be more reasonable for the clubs. At least that's what I gleaned from the tail end of Skip's presentation.

Karl, sorry I didn't see you there, but a McSorley's evening is definitely in order. With each successive round of "lights" my lap times drop and I more closely begin to approximate the Nietzschean ideal.

We did raise fees to $225/day. There comes a point (around the $200 mark) when people try to rationalize the expense vs. the rewards, and our attendance dropped below our break-even point.

I just finished a 3-day at the Glen for $200, including instructor discount. That's a value!

Bill K

Bill K, there should be another kink in the curve where the next level of price elasticity is. You may have scared away people by crossing the $200 threshold however the people still interested may be willing to pay significantly more without bailing out. Hopefully the revenue from fewer folks at the next higher price will get you back to break even.

Nice concept but I don't believe that for a minute, fewer days, same price or higher (because of inflation) and probably brie at the pits. But it will all be worth it 30 years from now.

so, how high is reasonable, even for those so nicely endowed?
we used to pride ourselves on having lots of track time in relatively small run groups.
even if we charge 75-80 people $300 each to run 3 or 4 sessions, we still come out short.
Bill K

We (Hudson Valley Region, PCA) have just received written, official information from Lime Rock that what's going to happen is that the existing users will continue to get the same days for which they've contracted in the past, but they'll have to share them with club members. i.e. rather than running from 0900 to 1700 alternating PCA run groups as we have been, we'll alternate our groups with "club" groups and get maybe half the time we have in the past

But it means--and I quote--"drastically reduced rents on those days."

Skip wrote, "We are asking everyone except the major events to give up some track time." Sez that included the school, when it signs its new lease in five years. This, as he points out, will help the clubs that have had trouble filling their track days and at least for awhile hurt the big groups that typically have to turn away drivers.