Indoor Kart Track ideas

In reply to Stefan :

Our insurance company is not cool with us taking our karts off site where the ignition kill system no longer works, the tire and plastic barriers are not in place and the track design has not been tested. Our parking lot is shared with a fabric store and is half gravel, half asphalt and they would not be game for us setting up a race track, and the insurance company wouldn't go for it, either. RC racers have approached us about using the track but are unwilling to pay the $100 per hour during off hours and are unwilling to provide their own insurance. The drone racing guys are the same as the RC guys: won't pay a reasonable rate and won't get insurance against damage to the facility. $100/hr is what the pit bikes pay for off hours and they are here every Saturday morning and every second Sunday morning all winter. We also had drift karts for a while but what would happen is the maintenance on the drift karts is way higher than regular karts and only 2 people would be in drift karts while 8 people waited to run the regular karts. It made no sense. We have a special for first responders and have posters up in the police/ambulance/fire fighter stations. We also have brochures in all the hotels in the city. We advertise on the big radio stations, too but not on TV because it's so damn expensive and people fast forward commercials, anyways.

snacks and drinks are a drop in the revenue bucket because of amount sold, or because of price charged?  your race prices are so cheap i'm looking at a summer home in your neck of the woods.  ;-)

Have you ever run T/S/D type competition? Ex: if the hot lap time at your track is 35 seconds, run a 10 minute session where you're aiming to get in ten "perfect" 42 second laps. Final score is determined by your ten laps closest to 42 seconds. Whoever's time is closest to a perfect 7 minute mark wins. Rewards consistency, being able to pack off blistering pace but hit a target. You would want your target time to be something that's achievable by at least 80% of your racers.

In reply to loosecannon :

Is it possible that one or both of the local car shows you mentioned could change venues and meet in your parking lot instead of wherever they are now?

Do you have a local roller derby team? Maybe see what they think about skating around your track. Not to play derby, just for skating racing or some sort of skatathon for charity.

How about a local robotics club? Maybe they would like to design robots that can navigate the track autonomously. They could have a robot race.

If you don't have enough room for proper food service, you need to kick the fabric store out next door and open a pizza shop. Both businesses will feed off each other. 

loosecannon said:

In reply to Stefan :

Our insurance company is not cool with us taking our karts off site where the ignition kill system no longer works, the tire and plastic barriers are not in place and the track design has not been tested. Our parking lot is shared with a fabric store and is half gravel, half asphalt and they would not be game for us setting up a race track, and the insurance company wouldn't go for it, either. RC racers have approached us about using the track but are unwilling to pay the $100 per hour during off hours and are unwilling to provide their own insurance. The drone racing guys are the same as the RC guys: won't pay a reasonable rate and won't get insurance against damage to the facility. $100/hr is what the pit bikes pay for off hours and they are here every Saturday morning and every second Sunday morning all winter. We also had drift karts for a while but what would happen is the maintenance on the drift karts is way higher than regular karts and only 2 people would be in drift karts while 8 people waited to run the regular karts. It made no sense. We have a special for first responders and have posters up in the police/ambulance/fire fighter stations. We also have brochures in all the hotels in the city. We advertise on the big radio stations, too but not on TV because it's so damn expensive and people fast forward commercials, anyways.

$100 an hour +insurance is way too much for R/C budgets. Just the way it is. Neither you or they are being unreasonable.

In reply to loosecannon :

Food truck....

the_machina said:

Have you ever run T/S/D type competition? Ex: if the hot lap time at your track is 35 seconds, run a 10 minute session where you're aiming to get in ten "perfect" 42 second laps. Final score is determined by your ten laps closest to 42 seconds. Whoever's time is closest to a perfect 7 minute mark wins. Rewards consistency, being able to pack off blistering pace but hit a target. You would want your target time to be something that's achievable by at least 80% of your racers.

 

We have not tried this but we did run a promotion where we had a target time and for every day that nobody got that target time on their fastest lap, another $25 was added to the pot. It once got to $500 before somebody won it. Cool idea but we track our sales and the average number of races purchased didn't go up at all, so that was a fail.

After a quick read though this thread, the ideas that jumped out to me are:

1) Car clubs/shows.  Host one.  Don't bring your stuff off site, bring the cars there.  Cars and coffee.  Partner with a coffee/breakfast food truck if possible.

2) Driving instruction classes/schools.

3) I like the idea of soliciting racing leagues to local businesses.  And teambuilding events.

4) I may have missed this, but do you do enduro events?  You could run some "10k" weekend charity events or so to pick up people that don't want to run a real 10k.  Obviously a charity event is for charity, not profit, but it will help expose others to the business.

Related:  Do any of the kart places also have i-racing or other simulators on site people can use?  They seem like they would be much cheaper to operate than karts and offer the opportunity to do real world tracks as well have a bigger/smaller field than the kart race.  Could make this different than karts (Rally game for example) to make sure they aren't really competing with each other.

mbmsg said:

In reply to loosecannon :

Food truck....

I have been pushing for getting a food truck to park outside the track. My partner suggested we hire one as a test so that's what we did. On two seperate occasions on our busiest day, we promoted the fact that we would have hot food on such and such a day. The result? Less than $10 per hour in food sales. No idea why this didn't work. That same food truck goes to car events and has great success

Good timing, I just did my first laps at the local carting place to me in Western MA last night, and got to hang out and talk with the owner after. Their independent, not in a mall, and run gas karts indoors in the winter with an outside extension that can be opened up for good weather in the summer. They claim 35mph on the indoor course, 50mph top speed on the longer straight outside. It did take me awhile to get around to going, and ended up going as part of a club with the university I'm at. The big deterrence was cost, as I've previously done a few races with K1 and found it prohibitively expensive. If I go back, it will be to take advantage of their 3hr rate on a slower week night ($80 normal, on sale for $60 sometimes), probably with an interested friend or two.

Ideally, I would pay more money for a higher quality experience: more interesting track (camber, curbs, elevation changes), weigh ins / ballast to even out weight differences, wheel to wheel racing... I have been enjoying watching the Club 100 karting on YouTube via Super GT's channel, and would be interested in trying a feeder series for that type of racing basically.

In regards to gas vs electric, I definitely liked the gas carts I drove last night more, as you could actually modulate the throttle and couldn't plant your foot all the way around the course right off the bat (the K1 experience I had was far to easy in that regard). I don't like the CVTs, due to the take up -- it felt like 3/4 of the pedal travel is spent getting the CVT to engage, with very little left to actually modulate acceleration. Also, I don't like one wheel drive; the electric karts perform better in that area. I think all of these comments come from my motivations for going karting, which is to get better at driving race cars (both in outright speed and managing traffic / overtaking).

In terms of business strategy, selling to groups means that you can make fewer deals for larger chunks of time -- maybe not even on a corporate scale, but on a "me and my beer buddies want to race each other once a week for the next month" type of way?

Edit: I should also add, this place did "Cars and Karts" on Wednesday nights in the summer, and I'm not usually into car shows /at all/ but I'll give it a try...

loosecannon said:

mbmsg said:

In reply to loosecannon :

Food truck....

I have been pushing for getting a food truck to park outside the track. My partner suggested we hire one as a test so that's what we did. On two seperate occasions on our busiest day, we promoted the fact that we would have hot food on such and such a day. The result? Less than $10 per hour in food sales. No idea why this didn't work. That same food truck goes to car events and has great success

Different atmosphere.

Outdoor events like car events, sporting events are a good match for a food truck. Your situation demands indoor food with adequate seating. Prices have to be reasonable. If someone is planning on going out to eat at say Mc Ds or pizza joint give them the option to eat at your place and go racing as well.

When video stores were popular, a pizza shop next door was a good companion. Go in for a movie, get a pizza as well and Vice versa. You need to find some way to accommodate Hungry racers.

In reply to rustybugkiller :

serving food indoors involves around $50,000 investment in a building we do not own and could be kicked out of at any time. We could park a food trailer outside and have seating inside, that's not a problem. As for electric karts that several have suggested, you cannot run electric karts continuously at the 35 mph our karts do. You must have minimum 30 karts so that while 10 are racing, 20 are charging. We do not have the space for 30 karts, nor do we have the $300,000 it would take to buy them.

Years ago the facility in Richmond, VA that was local to me used to run like clockwork.  Here's your ticket, safety briefing is immediate, queue up and go.  While one group is out running a heat, the next is getting belted in to a 2nd group of karts and starting engines, etc.  Soon as the first group comes in to pits, the other goes out, then 1st group pops out and goes in to debrief.  They ran 8 minute sessions, and you could usually get 6 sessions done in an hour.  If we wanted to run 3 races, we'd be in and out in 1.5 hours, tops, even if they were packed.  We went 2-3 times a month.

Nowadays, they don't call a heat to queue up until the previous has pitted, exited their cars, and you still wait 5-10 min to go out.  They run 2-3 8 min sessions an hour, and we can get stuck there for hours.  It seems to be similar elsewhere: I went to a karting track in Northern VA, and they had a 2 hour wait just to get to our first race.  There was maybe 30-40 people in the facility, it wasn't that they were packed.  I am less likely to go back if I have to budget 4 hours to run 3 races. 

Now, in their defense, both places had added laser tag and other non-karting venues, and I'm sure they had to staff up or balance where they spend their money.  But I miss the clockwork.  Made it feel more like serious racing.

I like the suggestion of corporate leagues.  Make it followable online, and can either have head-to-head race nights like a sports league with brackets, or just fastest five times by each team week to week or something. 

Also, it's awesome that someone on the forum owns a karting track.  I may fly out to visit some weekend just to go racing and enjoy Canada. 

I'm late to this thread, but are you trying to get new customers or get your existing customers to buy more?

If getting new customers, are you looking to get new "regulars" or new "one time fliers" (nothing wrong with that, it's the tourism model)?

There is a cart track near me. If they offered a league night like many bowling alleys do, and made it both competitive but also fun (teams?), and maybe mixed in some driver advancement opportunity (like coaching), I'd be really interested for both myself and my kids. So far I've been there once and as far as I can tell they have awesome carts and tracks but they think they are Dave and Buster's.

In reply to Flynlow :

We run pretty efficiently and when it's busy, we can get 10 races of 10 people through an hour. People who get 2 hour race passes typically get 17 races in that 2 hours. We actually were doing really good business until 2017 but we started to lose a lot of business to the Winnipeg Jets NHL team. Any time they play, we are slow and even that we could absorb but the City raised our property taxes $14,000 per year and our insurance has quadrupled to 6 figures in the last 3 years. Add it all up and we need to generate more business and we can't spend a ton of dough to do it. 

Have you tried offering a promotion through Groupon? Is that a thing in Canada? If so, you may be able to get some new folks in the door and then maybe hook some percentage of them to join a league or at least be return customers. 

I like the idea of adding some sim rigs, but that could end up being an expensive investment to get set up.

I wonder how hard it would be to stream races on Twitch? Might be another way for new people to find you. Might be too much work to do it since to make it work best you would need multiple cameras and people to run the show. 

If you can't increase business, can you lower your costs instead? Find different insurer?  Self-insure?   

Relocate next to a Hooters?  ;)

Survey your existing customers and ask what they want to come more often?

loosecannon said:

In reply to Flynlow :

We run pretty efficiently and when it's busy, we can get 10 races of 10 people through an hour. People who get 2 hour race passes typically get 17 races in that 2 hours. We actually were doing really good business until 2017 but we started to lose a lot of business to the Winnipeg Jets NHL team. Any time they play, we are slow and even that we could absorb but the City raised our property taxes $14,000 per year and our insurance has quadrupled to 6 figures in the last 3 years. Add it all up and we need to generate more business and we can't spend a ton of dough to do it. 

I didn't know Canada even had property taxes.

I know that G-Force Karts here in Richmond has vacated their indoor facility and moved outside to the RIR property.  I haven't been there yet, but it is said to be faster--60mph go-karts.  When they were indoors, the extra space they had was constantly being tweaked--laser tag, paintball, nerf guns.  I'm guessing they had a hard time covering expenses, since customer traffic was up and down, although there always seemed to be a fair number of karters when I was there.  They worked pretty hard promoting birthday parties and corporate events.  The snack bar was lame, but I realize that to do that right carries risks of its own.

The only other indoor facility around here runs electric karts, but for me, it just isn't as much fun without the sounds and the smells.

I think the food and drink idea is probably the most obvious money maker, but it would almost have to include alcohol, so yeah, headaches associated with drunks trying to get on track.   No telling how the local authorities would look at it.  Might be hard to get the ABC license, and I know they cost a bundle.

Micro brew-pub?  Hops 'N Karts?

This has me thinking bicycles for some reason. Maybe I just want to race BMX on a paved flat surface. Sounds like a hoot, yeah? Is that even a thing?

Ohh, got a few more ideas: 

Anytime the Jets play, 2 for 1 races. Bonus points if you can get a liquor license: Races half price 1 hour before gametime with purchase of beer bucket (to be consumed after the races)

Roller Derby on a racetrack! (insurance may kill it)

Inline skating races (insurance may kill it)

May be cost prohibitive, but get Byfuglien (he's not doing anything these days) or Ehlers or Wheeler for a meet and greet. Or hell, Canadians actually know their hockey history, get Hawerchuck or Nilsson or Hull in there (eh, maybe not hull unless you want a drunken wife beater) if possible. 

Hockey talk got me thinking:  Go-Karts on ice!  Has it been mentioned?  What could possibly go wrong?

What is the multi-media experience like?  Is there any way to have an action cam mounted on helmets with a data overlay?  Charge extra for that but I suspect many would pay a good bit more to have their race immortalized on a youtube channel.  I'm not a tech guy but I'd suspect that can be pretty automated.  Might even get you money from the youtubes as a content provider if you put up enough of it.

I don't know the ins and outs of the business but that insurance cost seems pretty exorbitant.  Shop around for another carrier?  See what your carrier would need to see changed to lower your rates?