I doubt there will be many changes.http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/alms-panoz-motor-sports-group-sells-mosport/
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Mosport has been sold
- Thread starter Wingboy
- Start date
Watch for the trailer-park in the middle of the paddock to disappear. That's prime real-estate for an more paddock pavement and a new track office/meeting building, plus a proper restaurant facility.
Nope, I doubt that will happen. The pocket books of area fans are only so deep and a given track facility can hold only so many big events before it starts to cannibalize its own sales. A big event every month or two during the climate-usable race season is about the limit for most tracks.
Big dollar private test days tend to follow big events. If there is no increase in the number of big events, there should be no significant increase in teh number of big dollar private tests days. There will still be plenty of dates available for amateur lapping and instruction days.
Regional race clubs are in no financial position to add extra dates. As it is right now they manage to break even and sometimes even post a small profit on the dates they have. More dates would impact their entrants though, and the effect on the AVERAGE club race competitor would be that even with more race dates available, they would still run the same number of events per year anyways. The only difference is that they would pick and choose their events, much as some already do now.
Panoz opened up the purse strings only in the first couple of years of his ownership. That's when all the last big improvements got made, and even then most of those were to teh track, walls and runoff areas and not to spectator facilities. Everything since then have been quite small incremental changes, and even those often only happened in response to the demands of race series and insurance companies.
My image of Panoz is a guy who was passionate about cars and would spend money in all sorts of places without being very critical about the potential for returns on those expenditures. This new outfit sounds like the more ordinary profit-motivated type of ownership than Panoz was, meaning tighter purse strings.
Cant speak for the other series but SOAR is 100% in great finacial shape and will jump at a Mosport date. I have had talks for the past three seasons with Myles about bringing the SOAR Family to Mosport and given the right date will pull the trigger on it in a NY second.
Good luck. Myles gives first dibs on given weekend dates to the big race series, and then on to those lesser race groups or track day groups that had it the year before. Newcomers get the leftovers if any exist. I know one group that waited for four years for their shot at getting an open weekend date, and they won't be letting go of that date anytime soon!
Pretty sure that's why Ride for Sight is in Orillia this year - the Canadian Tire NASCAR series had bigger clout as far as date selection on the road course goes. Pity.
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Your right that would be the perfect location especially when we get those mid summer mosport down pours. Just think sitting in a nice resturant sipping some beer looking over lake Mosport with the track in the background absolutely a thing of beauty !!!
Pity? I have the greatest respect for RFS,but imho it's a shame to use a world class race facility for a benefit rally.
Well, track rent is track rent no matter what's actually happening (or not) on that track. That track gets used for all sorts of things that are "beneath" a world class race facility. A benefit rally isn't a bad alternative when put alongside some of them. ;-)
It's a pity because Mosport last summer was a good time and provided a nice all-in-one venue.
Turbodish your a tad mistaken. We were within a day of having a weekend last year and like I said we will continue our talks. It has nothing to do with series size etc etc etc. It is the cost of configuring the track for safe bike use. It takes almost 10K in haybales and they all have to be brought in then removed. So they keep all the bike dates close together and there is a limit on available weekends. Like I said I have an open dialouge with the track and keep up to date with them. It has to be the right deal for us as well and some of the proposals from Mosport were/are not in our best interest. If and when a decent date comes along we will be ready.
If you've ever been sitting in his office, you might have noticed the two white boards propped up on the window ledge behind your chair. It contains the dates that the track has been booked. It tends to start filling for next year even before the current year has finished, and the regular organizations do get first choice of dates. Toronto Chinese Motorsport Club for example generally gets every holiday Monday throughout the season, and Dexter gets a Friday most months. BARC and BEMC have their traditional dates throughout the season that eat up 5 or 6 weekends of the season.
VRRA floats around a bit, in part because ALMS dates keeps floating around. Various chapters of different BMW and Porsche clubs book a number of three-day weekends and have been doing so for years on their traditional dates. Those organizations always get first dibs, and free weekends don't open up very often.
You're right about trying to align dates with other bike race or track day events, and that makes sense given the logistics and cost of doing the hay bale thing.
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