Reason to lift SCCA membership requirements
Brian,
The trend is nothing new. Rallye St. Agathe (Canadian National/ProRally) drew more competitors than did WildWest held the same weekend and some of the reasons why were discussed here.
http://www.specialstage.com/forum/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?az=read_count&om=1781&forum=DCForumID2
Similarly, to compare LSPR, the last SCCA ProRally on the calander, with Tall Pines, the last CARS National rally on the calander; you'll see LSPR had 33 entries, TallPines already has 41 and growing.
You'd think the decreasing number of SCCA ProRally entrants is hurting the ProRally organizers. Its a number game between increasing entry fees and decreasing entries. Regardless of entry fees, less entries cause less operating money to host the rally meaning perhaps less the rally can offer (freebies, awards, promotion, worker perks,..). Hope Rally America will stick around to offer funding to the ProRallies.
What I don't understand is why SCCA doesn't help the organizers by lifting the membership required to participate in SCCA rallies. As Adrian Wintle points out
http://www.specialstage.com/forum/cgi-bin/DCForumID2/1946.html#28 is a reason Canadians don't enter SCCA events.
For years now I've been told that SCCA Risk Management and it's insurance requires participants to be SCCA members. However, recently I asked Pete Lyons of SCCA Risk management, where in the insurance or risk management documents is this required. (See, I go thru channels without just complaining on SS). His reply was that membership is not a requirement by risk management or the insurance however the insurance may be cheaper if membership is required. He did not seem certain in that aspect though.
True, SCCA would lose membership funds if they did not require licensed CARS competitors to be SCCA members. However, SCCA would gain additional sanction and insurance funds with the increased entries from north of the border, the organizers would profit (well, perhaps not be paying out of their pocket to hold a rally) with increased entries, and the overall competition would be in the US would be much better with Canadian entries.
Just a couple years ago when I was running in SCCA ProRallies with a Canadian driver, John McArther would not recognize his CARS seed as equilalant to the SCCA driver's seed. John's reasoning was that the competition in Canada was less than it was in the US. Now, a scant 2 years later, its the Canadian entry list that outnumber the SCCA's.
Great class competition too.
Check out all the US and Canadian Production class entries at Tall Pines. 13 Production class cars. More than all SCCA ProRallies this season added together.
And in Gr2, Scott Fuller, Andrew and Chris Havas coming to Canada to run against Jon Nichols and Gord Olsen.
Currently, only Tom McGeer in Open, the Pilons and Scott Trinder in PGT or Peter Thomson in GroupN come to the US to compete that make interesting US events to compare to the Canadian competion.
My recommendation is for SCCA to lift the requirement for CARS licensed competitors to be SCCA members for the benefits mentioned above.