Learn Me .... Drop in SCCA formula car racing

In reply to triumph7 :

I don't quite buy that. There seem to be plenty of organisations around that are running track days in various formats, and a lot of them seem to be doing OK.

triumph7 said:

Could it be that people are just not participating in a lot of things?  It seems that there are fewer and fewer participants in everything especially car related.  I see fewer people bicycling, bowling or working out at the gym... I guess they're all home playing video games?

BoxheadTim said:

In reply to triumph7 :

I don't quite buy that. There seem to be plenty of organisations around that are running track days in various formats, and a lot of them seem to be doing OK.

Think of auto racing as dancing, and Formula cars kinda like square dancing. Was a thing at one time and the participants enjoyed it and continued till the generation died off with the younger generations choosing a different form of the activity. People still race, people still dance.

This seems like asking the wrong question to the wrong people, and is mostly just giving a scatter plot of uncorrelated subjective data points and wild speculation. Nobody here knows how much of the problem is an increase in the rate of people leaving the class/club/sport vs an increase in the turnover rate of the class/club/sport vs a decrease in the rate of new people joining the class/club/sport. That is all required information to determine the correct questions to ask each group of recent former participants, current participants, and potential future participants. The only questions we're generally able to answer are those aimed at potential future participants, but even those should be limited in scope enough to not cast too wide of a net and catch too much data from people are not even realistic potential future participants. The cub needs to defining what genre of participants are targeted by each class, and focus in on them. This includes things like disposable income level and cost considerations, interest/ability to self-maintain, self-design/build vs spec cars, and relative interest in speed vs competition.

Back when I would have considered myself a potential future participant, I started off looking heavily at the 'upcoming' (at the time) F600 cars, as that best fit my combination of budget, aversion to production car compromises, and desire to design/build. However, the local class participation that could be counted on one hand of somebody missing two fingers led me to a realization. If my goal was to build a car to drive, I'd be better off build a street car capable of going to the occasional autox/track event. If my goal was to compete, I'd be better of competing in a class with the maximum local competition. At that point, if I had gone down the latter road, I probably would have gone Legends cars due to the combination of class sizes, number of venues, and number of events...Including autox and the occasional road race.

SCCA already has the data they need to get started on a data-driven ('scientific') appraoch, and the resources necessary to get the rest of the data to finish analyzing and understanding nature of the problem. How to reverse a trend going the wrong way is going to be rather difficult though, and potentially impossible, as some of the answers will likely be things not easily changed.