This is the time of year when, in most parts of the country, the SCCA switches over to holding meetings about racing. I'm sitting here in a meeting room in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, listening to discussion on various topics relating to running the club. In other rooms, there are discussions about Solo (Autocross) and Rally. We will have two awards events today, the NARRC awards luncheon and tonight, a banquet where NEDiv rewards will be given out.
The first session of the morning was for Club Racing in general. Topics included declining Nationals program in the northeast (race count, competitor count, lack of interest in towing to Topeka were all brought up), unification of flagging rules (the east coast differs from the west coast in some significant ways, this is something that people have been complaining about for decades, don't expect progress), fuel testing and the lack thereof, and rules process issues.
Now we're in the NARRC session, and Andy Bettencourt is presenting the results of the driver's committee survey of NARRC drivers. Among the issues are potentially getting rid of the NARRC points fund admitting additional regions to NARRC, and tweaking the points system. Also under discussion is the success of events such as Dick Stewart's Formula Vee festival and encouraging more such events.
Previously mentioned was that there will be a number of races at the new track in Millville. Four Lime Rock races just got added to the schedule last night, but there are a number of issues at Lime Rock which create uncertainties with those races.
Lime Rock costs are also an issue, the track is apparently working to a degree with the regions to mitigate the situation.
The last race of the season at Millville may well be a NARRC-MARRC challenge race; this would be the third weekend of October.
Creating IT-7 (for old ITA RX-7s) is also being proposed; the rules would just be the ITA rules. There are lots of old ITA RX-7s parked in garages because ITA is slowly getting faster.
The NARRC expansion proposal is somewhat controversial; traditionally NARRC consists of the 4 regions that race at Lime Rock - New York Region, MoHud, New England, and North Jersey. One Watkins Glen race is often on the NARRC schedule in response to driver request. Expansion would represent a significant change, but many drivers want NARRC to become something verging on a NEDiv regional championship series.
Some of this may be exacerbated by the challenges at Lime Rock; there aren't necessarily going to be 4 races at Lime Rock despite the tentative scheduling because of the unreasonable cost to run there. We could be looking at one National and the NARRC Runoffs and nothing else at Lime Rock in 2008. There could be 2 regionals up for grabs at other tracks.
Trophies are also a serious topic of discussion. Better trophies and better schemes for controlling trophy costs are an issue.
Pointskeeping issues with drivers who aren't running the series are being hotly discussed. There aren't any really great solutions to this problem, and it's not clear how serious a problem it really is.