We like racing. It’s larger than life, smelly, loud, dangerous and infinitely beautiful. We want to see it not only survive, but thrive. As long as two people are on motorized vehicles, there will be racing. But getting lots of people to come watch them race? That’s a bit more challenging.
Thirty to forty years ago (or more), motor sports were relatively new, and the world was a very different place. For a lot of people, motor cycles, cars, go-karts and snowmobiles were the hot, shiny new technology gizmo that everyone wanted and everyone wanted to be a part of. A race coming to your town as as about a big a deal as the county fair. It was fairly easy to get a crowd to watch people compete to see who could go faster than the other guy.
Now it’s not so easy. The people that used to go watch races whenever they could have a ton of entertainment choices in front of them every single minute of every day. In reality, racing is doing very well. The motor sports marketplace is estimated at $12 billion dollars. It employs about 64,000 people and has an estimated annual growth rate of 1.9%. But when you go to a race and see the stands about 2/3 empty, it can be disheartening.
And let’s face it: It’s just more fun for everyone when there is a healthy crowd to watch a race.
So how do we get them there?
It’s pretty simple: Improve the experience of racing for the fans, the drivers and the promoters.
That’s what we are doing at Raceday. By making the process of setting up and managing your races as insanely simple as possible, by making participation by drivers easier and more fun and by always looking for new ways to reach out to potential new race fans and get them as addicted as we are.
We work to improve the experience from the angle that we are most comfortable with: Technology. Most, if not all of the people racing today didn’t know a time when there wasn’t an internet, and most didn’t know a time when a mobile phone was just a phone. Yet too many race tracks and associations are using severely outdated technology, or worse, none at all, leaving them in direct conflict with the expectations of their own racers.
Let’s fix that.