Post by Brad Wunder on Sept 6, 2009 14:10:19 GMT -5
Last year during one of our NFRA meetings we discussed what we could do to get more folks involved in karting in general, and involved with the NFRA in particular. One of the ideas we (I believe Brad42
) came up with was talking to the folks at RPM about doing "something". We never really identified what that something was however and we never really moved past the light bulb stage. The other day I jumped onto their website and noticed that they have a racing "league". Their league isn't what I would typically think of as a league where you have some sort of a season with points accumulating over time. Their current league is essentially stand-alone one race night events where there is no accumulation of point towards any kind of long term goal. So I started thinking, what if we ran a series of say 5 races (2 in January, 2 in February and a final race in March) where points are accumulated and a series championship is awarded? Sounded like fun to me! Before I got too carried away I thought I should see if RPM would even be interested in something like this since it is quite a departure from the way they run things. I went down to RPM on Friday and ran the idea by the manager. He thought it was a fantastic idea and said they would be VERY interested. In fact, he said that just the day before the owner and management team was kicking around doing something along the same lines. Furthermore, he thought partnering with the NFRA would be a great way to get the series off the ground.
Initially I'd think the WRL would be for individual drivers. But, as I was thinking this out, I think there are opportunities to do some really cool team based events as well. How cool would it be to have a team series where you had 3 or 4 member teams from Dixon, Davis, PC, and independent teams like Team NFRA, etc. all on the track at the same time and team points are awarded based on finishing position of the individual drivers?
So what does all this have to do with the original goal of getting more folks involved with the NFRA? What better place to try and get folks, who are ALREADY karting, to make the transition to outdoor karting than a place like RPM? They have already been bitten by the karting need for speed, now we just need to entice them to make the logical move to the outdoor venues. Some of those folks don't know anything other than indoor karting and we could be a great resource to these folks when it comes to what class to go to (f200, WF, or BSC), track support (remember how overwhelming it was when you began?) etc.
As I said, the manager at RPM was very interested in this WRL idea. If you guys are interested in doing something like this, I'll get a meeting setup with the owner of RPM next week. So, whatcha think?
