Having the federal and local governments shut everything down has been devastating to a lot of people, and the racing community has been hit particularly hard. Here at Raceday, we saw events and registrations come to a complete halt at the very beginning of March, and it has not picked up yet. That’s two months of losses, and it more than likely will become three months. However, we are not doing nearly as bad as some of our Raceday customers. Like us, some of them will be fine, but of course, we are all concerned with how long this will go on.
I know of one karting group who announced they were going to have a race but use all the best practices of social distancing to put it on. Unfortunately, they announced it on Twitter. For those of you who don’t use Twitter, good for you! Twitter is literally a cesspool of hate, and nothing more. Once this poor group announced the race, the blue-check warriors came out in masse to scream at them for “killing children”. The blowback was so harsh that they canceled the event. They later found that of the hundreds of people how had a Twitter hissy-fit, only two of them were at all involved with motorsports, and neither of them had anything to do with karting!
The moral of the story? I’ve yet to see Twitter adding a single ounce of demonstrable value to ANY race association. It is seriously useless, even detrimental to our community. Don’t bother with Twitter. Instead, focus on your own website, and use social media ONLY to refer back to your website. Except for Twitter. Don’t waste your time there.
The backlash to the lockdown has begun, and there is no finer example of someone doing his best to walk the line of keeping people safe but also to avoid bankruptcy than Summit Motorsports Park’s Bill Bader Jr. He’s decided he’s had enough, and will not stand down and watch as his business disappears down the tube.
“…if you look at the numbers as a result of COVID-19, they are a fraction of projection. Whoever drove this machine, led us to believe this was going to be a catastrophic loss of life, and that’s proving out now that that’s certainly not going to be the case. And yet, the media is not taking their foot off the gas.” That’s a brave statement that is inviting scrutiny from a media that is all in on hyping the pandemic for all it is worth. He continued: “If we are able to save every life and limit and ultimately mitigate any outbreaks, but in the process of that, we all starve to death, then what did we accomplish?”
Then Mr. Bader laid down the law:
“Please understand something, and hear me when I say this: I am not asking, I am opening. There is a certain amount of risk in that, but I will tell you this: as I sit here at this desk, I am being asked to sit here and slowly, daily, hourly, and by the minute, to die. And I don’t do that well. I’m not going to sit passively by and watch my family’s hard work go down the drain at the hands of machine that I don’t even understand.”
Well said Mr. Bader, and we all wish you and your racers the best of luck and we applaud your courage.
Read the full article on Dragzine.com.