We are still a couple of months from the start of our track "season" in Canada - have any of the regions in the U.S south found any significant impact on numbers of participants. 

 

I've heard that some racing series are feeling the pinch - any feel for how Performance Driving Schools are doing?

 

 

PBOC's Sebring event in January looked thinner than last year but the organizers told us it was sold out. The enduro had 79 cars to last year's 104. I think it will be a tough year personally.

People registering to less events and riving shorter distances to an event. And the mandated passport to cross the border as of June 2009 will also probably cut a few US registrations to Canadian events. Car clubs may want to unite if they want to concentrate registrations and not loose money.

Tarheel BMWCCA at VIR had 210 entries, Zone 2 PCA has the same. Not a great deal of drop off.

I can't comment really on attendance, although the one event I've registered for so far has a long way to go before it's booked and it's not that far off. Probably 9 weeks, it's close. The one thing I've seen this season that I haven't seen in seasons past is that alot of clubs have opened their entire seasons' DE schedule for registering instead of waiting the normal 60 days and then open that event to regions members for a week and after that open registration. Maybe clubs are afraid of the level of commitment by its members. One event I always go to is Shenandoah Circuit in April with RTR-PCA. They cancelled their April DE out of the blue. I reregistered with another club on Shenandoah just a couple of weeks later but I also have noticed that alot of the same groups have not signed up for events or have cut back on the number of events that they usually attend at Summit Point during the season. It'll be interesting to see how our sport/hobby changes over the next year or so.

In 2008, we seemed to have a good amount of attendance at nearby events, but it was really hard to get anyone to travel. Our local SCCA region had to cancel some race weekends... NASA didn't, but I wouldn't be surprised if they took a loss. Hastings is a great track (and everyone loves George), but it was really hard to get anyone to commit to drive 8-10 hours from Denver. I would expect 2009 to be mostly the same trend.

I have been to 3 events in Florida so far this year, Sebring, Moroso and NASA. The first two were run by PBOC whose executive commented on the reduced attendance, more so at Moroso (now called PBIR) than at Sebring. The DE at Sebring was thinner than 2008, but the races seemed well filled. NASA also seemed less populated, although I didn't ask. The Daytona 500 also had reduced fan attendance - not sure if it was because of the rain forecast or because fewer trailer folks were traveling to Florida because of the economy. :)