Autocross is dying

This might be controversial, but even as the attendance grows, and membership grows, I believe autocross is going to die out as a sport because venues will be lost.  The SCCA at a national level does little to nothing to help local clubs secure venues.  Nationals themselves is losing their national site at Lincoln and Oscada.  Rallycross isn't much better as they struggle to find a national location and haven't had a tour in years.  As malls go under, Amazon snatches the land up immediately.  Airports are a struggle as best, amusements parks make more money on parking than they ever would renting for an SCCA event.  Sporting venues seem to rather rent the insides and then charge for parking which makes more sense.  Most race tracks could have events but they are few and far between.  I'd like to see a greater effort on a national level to help secure venues nationwide.

There is no money in it, and has high perceived risk.  Those are two things corporations hate, and they get more powerful every day.

It's not dying, it's getting suffocated.  

For me, it is the high cost. Not so much in terms of the vehicle, I could find co-drives if I wanted to, but in entry fees, consumables, and the big one, time. 

I just don't have the time that I used to, and some of that is due to the lack of venues. 

I personally think that the future of autosports is in indoor karting, but the problem will always be that you need to keep it affordable while still making a profit.

Rallycross has one big advantage: it doesn't require pavement. 

Unfortunately, all the places that might offer large expanses of cheap land are also really far from population centers.

I know our local rallycross group struggles to attract people to events because nobody wants to drive two hours, especially when the event starts at 8AM and you need to be there by 7AM at the latest.

That's one advantage of indoor karting - it can be in the heart of a city, and events can happen at 10PM, rain or shine. 

I gotta point out that auto-x doesn't exactly leave parking lots as they were found as well, plus the perceived and sometimes real liability for the owners.  As a participant, I enjoy the driving part of it but the time breakdown doesn't make sense for me and my life. It doesn't make sense to spend 10 hours for under 6 minutes of driving time

pheller said:

Rallycross has one big advantage: it doesn't require pavement. 

Unfortunately, all the places that might offer large expanses of cheap land are also really far from population centers.

I know our local rallycross group struggles to attract people to events because nobody wants to drive two hours, especially when the event starts at 8AM and you need to be there by 7AM at the latest.

That's one advantage of indoor karting - it can be in the heart of a city, and events can happen at 10PM, rain or shine. 

Out of curiosity how much space/condition of land is needed for rallycross?

I'm not sure it's as dire as the topic makes it sound, but the sport definitely faces threats from "progress." After 9/11 we lost of lot of airbases, and many of them never came back, and even past the point when they could have come back I think a lot of decisions were made that the ROI was never worth it to begin with.

But instead of dying, I think the sport will just evolve. Track sprint and track cross will become more of a thing, more country club tracks will become realistic options, and just like the dinosaurs in a certain doomed amusement park, autocross will find a way.

It's not going to be easy, though, and the climate 20 years from now is likely to look much different than it does today. But there's still plenty of national-caliber venues around the country with local infrastructure capable of hosting a championship level event. They might not be as geographically convenient, but they may be the only resort should Lincoln actually get developed.

My kids are essentially raised, I'm in the highest earning years in my career, and I'm getting older.  In short, I now have 2 nickles to rub together, and more say over what I do with my free time.  I'm quite literally just coming into autocross (my 2nd try at it is in a few weeks), so between autocross and HPDE, I'm looking to get out and drive in anger.  I'm certain there are many, many people like me, who will support the venues and events that allow us to get out and drive, wherever, and however that may be..

In reply to dclafleur :

Rallycross is best with at least 10 acres for the course and another acre or two for paddock and grid.  Unfortunately, a season of renting out a field in a farm for rallycross use generally provides less income than growing crops on it.  The other consideration is rallycross venues work much better if cars or heavy equipment park on the field to compact the dirt between events.  That is why you see so much fairground overflow parking.

What's the average cost to an organizer for access to 10-12 acres?

Reason being, I can find 20 acres of land out in the desert, or even up in slightly more compacted dirt areas for less than $20,000. 

Both clubs I was involved with in Connecticut have struggled to find pavement.  And the pavement affects the size of the crowd.  One club had 10 acres of bad pavement, but it was 10 acres, and the car counts were capped.  The lot got sold, new attorneys looked at what we were doing, and it was bye bye!  Next lot was maybe 3 acres, car counts in the 40's.  I haven't autoxed in CT in a decade, but friends tell me it's hit on miss on what sites.  Too many sites cancel at the last minute, or raise the price thru the roof.  It's sad, had a great time and met a lot of good friends parking lot racing.

Racebrick said:

There is no money in it, and has high perceived risk.  Those are two things corporations hate, and they get more powerful every day.

Our future is in huge cities with small condos and apartments and offices, the rules made by CEOS and investors, and no space or time for anything that doesn't make the 1%ers more money. Kind of most of the major cities on the East and West Coast today. I am actually kind of happy that I won't live long enough to see the end result of this.

In reply to pheller :

Rallycross is setup for a $500 per day land rental.  That means with 30 participants paying $50 each, scca takes roughly half, or $750, mostly for insurance, the venue takes $500, and $250 goes in the bank for yearly expenses (cones, trailer repair, radios, etc)

Part of the problem is that autocross is getting more expensive. It costs $45 to do an event where I live. I'm sure you could thank the insurance companies and the increased cost of lot rental for that increase. I can remember when it was $20. SCCA is close to $100 for a membership that you need before you pay the $45 for the event. Forty Five bucks plus the increased cost of gas to get away from the City makes for an expensive day, even if you bring your own lunch. I would be doing more autocrossing if not for the price. And if you want to be competitive you have to buy a set of sticky tires that wear out quickly and that is about $800 to $1,000 bucks. Make that $2,000 if you want to mount them on a really nice set of wheels.

Want to be competitive in a modified class? It's kind of like chucking $100 bills into a toilet endlessly. Then a trailer for the modified car and a truck to tow it and even more gas to get to the event, and so on. And they want to recruit younger people with less money to the sport? Wow.

Just to clarify, Lincoln isn't lost...at least not yet. Best case we'll just have a bit less/different space. We currently use the space we have wildly inefficiently, so it's possible the functional effect on the event could be almost nothing. The fact that oscoda is a loss is a sign that things were already not going great. I really enjoyed it there, but objectively it wasn't really a good site, very small for a national site, not the best surface, and three hours away from anyplace. It's a really nice vacation area but even that was only ever enough to half fill the national events they had there.

Also careful what you wish for on rallycross. Part of what makes it work and be sustainable is that the events are generally under attended. Part of the national site problem is that it's hard to find a site of any size with a resilient enough surface to support 100+ cars over a full weekend. I think the Ohio site was lost largely due to mismanagement by the club, but realistically it probably only had a couple of years left before the site was just used up beyond what the owners were willing to deal with repairing anyway.

One of the difficult part with finding sites now is that new construction tends to have too many obstacles:  green spaces, light poles, etc.  

In reply to dps214 :

I cannot speak to club management, but I have been rallycrossing with Ohio since 2004 and the only site that have had any reasonable staying power were sites owned by competitors, and NTR.

Smoke and Mirrors was a small side lot on a very enthusiastic competitor's farm.  He built the world's nicest outhouse near where we paddocked because portapotties have no class.

Bitzer's Farm was the same, with the benefit of having two different fields that we could alternate between.  Suggestions of making a course out of the driveway had been dismissed  (I can't SAY that I was 60mph getting air sideways over a crest in the S40...)

The other sites got shredded and with no enthusiastic on site maintenance, venues would get lost.

I do strongly recall going back to Preble County Fairgrounds with a small group of other WOR members to fix the ruts with a small tractor and shovels, and rake the torn up grass back over the dirt.  Trophy's still on the wall, was driving Miles' Outback Sport to a podium finish in SA...

I thought this in the 1980s. Was working the course, in the hot sun chasing cones for several hours and wondered, with no spectators other than family, (showing a lack of public interest, and therefore, support), how can this succeed long-term? How many people are willing to give up a whole day for ~3 minutes of track time? How many are fine standing in the hot/cold for several hours chasing cones? How far are they willing to drive for this 3 minutes? Maybe I'm just old and "been there done that."

Sunday and evening shopping killed it here.  We had a Tuesday night series, and a Various Sunday series.  No malls left in about 1990, so we went to the arena in town and got berkeleyed by a political argument between the city and the management of the arena(city owned), because there was an argument over who pad for repaving if they allowed it to be damaged.  

We left it cleaner than when we showed up, and avoided any place with tender asphalt, but nobody has the stones to tell us its ok.

kb58 said:

I thought this in the 1980s. Was working the course, in the hot sun chasing cones for several hours and wondered, with no spectators other than family, (showing a lack of public interest, and therefore, support), how can this succeed long-term? How many people are willing to give up a whole day for ~3 minutes of track time? How many are fine standing in the hot/cold for several hours chasing cones? How far are they willing to drive for this 3 minutes? Maybe I'm just old and "been there done that."

IMHO, for autocross to make sense one has to stop viewing it as "8 hours of time for 5 minutes of driving".  It needs to be about going to the event to hang out with your friends and doing a bit of competitive driving while you're there.  If you don't have friends in the club then it'll never make sense.

Autocross site loss is a real issue.  Around here the biggest cause is that land has gotten so expensive that big empty parking lots are getting turned into buildings with parking garages.  A second issue is that what few new big parking lots that ARE being built are full of planters, concrete dividers, and solar panel racks that make them useless for autocrossing.

In reply to codrus (Forum Supporter) :

I’d agree that, for me as well, autocross is about hanging out for a day and doing car stuff with relatively little risk and at a relatively low cost. 

We’ve had site issues here in Florida as well. I always hope that the next new person to get hooked could be our fairy godmother who controls the perfect site. 

Yes, I don't mean this to be derogatory, but if you view autocross as "eight hours in the sun for five minutes of driving" you're correct, it's not for you (and that's fine). The social aspect is a big part but even as far as the driving goes there's several things that autocross provides you that other motorsports can't, or at least is a lot more expensive and risky to do. (and likewise other forms of motorsport provide things that autocross can't). The slice of the population interested by autocross is pretty thin, but then again that's true of most motorsports. Within the SCCA autocrossers are by far the biggest demographic, for what that's worth.

Based on detroit region's recent success, clearly the solution is to take all the autocross sites that aren't lost but no longer in use due to surface decay, and use them for tarmac rallycross.

In reply to dps214 :

There is a stack of tires in Evan's basement that have quarter inch thick sheets of asphalt stuck to them from one of the lots that OVR used to autocross on.

The imbalance alone from that is mind boggling, as well as suspension boggling, dashboard boggling, eyeball boggling....

As someone who has raced wheel-to-wheel, the cost of autocross is practically free (okay, except for tires). Yes, a whole day there for three minutes of actual driving time, but as others have said, it's a great social activity with other like-minded people.