Unfortunately due to time constraints and the lack of a PA system, the prepared Presidents report was not read at the meeting, but here it is.

2003 SoCal USRA Presidents Report

Firstly, thank you all for showing your support for our racing by caring enough to come along today and exercise your vote to help shape the future of slot racing here in Southern California.

I am told this year has been one of the best ever, with record numbers of entries in our scale racing reaching over 1100 entries for the year. It's quite an achievement for any series to average 100 entries per round, especially when there are 11 rounds. This year has been a year of experimentation. We started out the year with a two day marathon, after which we faced the difficult decision of  how to get our racing under control and finished at a reasonable hour. Credit is due to our scale committee for coming up with what has been proven to be a great compromise which allows us to average so many entries, and yet be leaving for home from the raceway before midnight, that is unheard of in slot racing anywhere.

We have also seen other innovations in our racing this year, including, with the help of Bill Vanderziel, a trial of the travelling race director. This has been a great success and has promoted more consistency within our series, although those that lost positions after being hit with a 5 lap penalty may not agree. Being a race director is a thankless job and everyone seems to think you are looking for a fight. Watching 8 drivers, 8 cars, 14 to 20 turn marshalls and the computer screen while watching for the impossible crashes you cannot even see really is an impossible job, and we all need to remember this when we blame the race director for missing something. Bill is intending to do a lot more racing next year, so anyone who would like to help out with this thankless task next year should see me later.

Another great innovation for this year is our newsletter. It’s the best series newsletter anywhere in the world. A huge thank you has to go to Paul Abbey for stepping up and putting this together. It has been a great disappointment to me that we have had such a great publication at our disposal, and yet noone has stepped up to add extra content to the newsletter. I cannot say at this time if this will continue into next season as it is a costly thing to put together, and without a substantial increase in advertising revenue we may have to look at other alternatives. Whatever form our race reporting takes next year it needs a fresh approach. I keep hearing "I can't write and article". Noone said you have to be a novelist to report on a slotcar race, a simple list of things that happened during a race, or a short story on what you did on your way to the race would make some different and interesting reading. We have our race reporters to tell us about who finished where and how they got there, what will make things more interesting is a few tales of things that happened along the way

Our website continues to be one of the best around and is setting the standard that other series are struggling to live up to. As the webmaster I have struggled to keep up all year, with results and pictures sometimes being a little slow being posted, but I am only human and can only do so much by myself, as there is many hours in putting together the results, tech sheets and photos from each race. For next year I would ask anyone with any sort of internet or graphic skills to step up and help me out by sharing the workload to do all the things with the site that we should be doing.

Yet another positive for the year has been the increased participation in the 4.5" NASCAR class. Paul Sterrett worked tirelessly to put the sponsorship together with Slixx and has turned the class into a success story. The concours competition and the compulsary decals have added a whole new dimension to the racing. We have a class that finally looks realistic and yet still go well on the track, a balance that is difficult to achieve. It has been amazing to watch some of the entrants as they kept upping the standard of their concours cars as the year went. A huge thank you must also go to  Gary Ross, our official concours judge. Gary did an outstanding job all year and I hope he will continue on into next year. Thank you Gary, Paul and Slixx.

Another huge positive for the series is the surge in younger racers, and I want to take the opportunity to congratulate all of you on great performances throughout the year. It's fantastic to look at the years results and see so many racers who are still at school. This can only be a good sign for the years to come. For the rest of us we all need to step up and help out our younger drivers to make sure they remain interested in slot car racing and so they learn all the little speed secrets that make all the difference. Without our younger racers there is no future.

This is also a call to all of you younger guys to not be afraid to get involved in the running of our series. Please do not think that just because you are young that your opinion will be ignored, or that you have nothing to offer. I remember back to when I was 13 or 14 racing at my home club in New Zealand in which at the time we had a number of rules that separated racers by their age, so if you were young you were not allowed to even race against the older racers.  I fought to get involved in the running of the club and finally was allowed a voice in the decision making process, which then helped the older racers to understand what we really wanted out of our club and our racing. With that in mind I am committed to getting more of you involved  and as a start there is a proposal  to be voted on today to create a position on the scale rules committee for a representative from our younger racers.

With the scale nats being in Portland next year from April 13-18 there is a big opportunity for many of us to attend the race, and for SoCal as a group to show the rest of the country we are a force to be reckoned with. We are hoping to put together some travel deals to help make the trip a little easier and cheaper so everyone should give some thought to whether they are able to attend. This year the racing will be split, with Experts racing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and Amateurs Friday, Saturday and Sunday, unlike last year when both raced on the same day.  This is a great opportunity for everyone here to attend a nats if you haven't been to one before, and to learn what the very top level of slot car racing is all about.

On the other side of the fence I fear that our wing racing is almost in a state of crisis. Entries are at record lows with only 285 entries total for the year, that's about 25 entries per round. With entries this low on this side we all need to work together to ensure the survival of the series. These levels effectively mean that the wing car racing is economically unviable for our raceways, they can earn more out of a single birthday party than they can from a whole day and night of racing, without the mess of having to clean up after we cover their track with glue. It's time to face facts, if nothing is done to encourage entries we will struggle to find any raceways to race at.

At one of the recent wing races someone worked out the approximate average age of everyone in the room, and if my memory serves me right the average age was near 50, that there I feel is one of the problems that we must address. There are no new racers coming into wing racing, and without new racers it will die.  It all has to start at the raceway level, we all have to get behind our raceways and turn up to those weekly races and race boxstock or whatever class we can get going, and we have to stop making it so difficult for racers to get competitive.

There are a couple of proposals being voted on today that have the potential to create more discord within our wing racing ranks, specifically the proposal to remove sprayglue 12's. Just so that it is stated the total entries for the wing racing for the year was 285, of that 101 entries were in the sprayglue class, that effectively means we are wiping out one of our best attended classes, which makes little sense for a series in crisis. I have heard all the arguments about the practice, the time taken by the sprayglue race and every other negative comment on earth, but I will answer with one word, compromise. Every problem has a compromise solution if both sides give just a little.

A compromise for the practice issue might be to split the track up on Friday's and Saturday morning, some lanes glued, some not. A compromise for the time taken by sprayglue race might be for everyone to have their cars ready on time and into tech. It’s all very well for people to say "just start the race" however with numbers so low  one or two additional entries make a huge difference to the overall entry for the day. If our raceways are to continue to open at 7am, there really isn't any reason why we couldn’t start racing at 8:00am instead of 9:00. Something seems very wrong to me that it can take 15 hours to run 4 races, when on the scale side we can run through 100 entries in that same time, and I spend more time chasing people to get into tech than we ever have to in the scale racing.

The other disturbing proposal is the death of the travelling series. SoCal USRA wing racing has long been known for it's willingness to travel to various raceways and race on all sorts of tracks. I get stories all the time from racers about when they used to run on all these different tracks, and yet here we are staring down the barrell of turning the series into a one track series, although there is a small glimmer of hope in that there seems to be some support for visiting Uncle Kals to race on the Engleman, which has to be the flattest track in Southern California. To me, the failure to visit different tracks simply drops the series stature from one of a great regional series to nothing more than a local race series. This should not happen to a series with so much tradition and history behind it.

Again that word, compromise, comes to mind. Maybe a good compromise could be to hold most of the races at Buena Park, with other raceways holding one race a year each, with some flexibility in the schedule to cancel or move those races should there be not enough people willing to travel to make the race viable. Whatever the solution we need to work together with the racers and the raceways to make sure the series survives in a manner befitting  the grand old lady of wing car series.

On a personal note I have enjoyed racing with all of you in both wing and scale, and hope to continue doing the same next year. I am particularly proud to have been a part of two close championships, one on each side of the fence, ending up second in both. In GT 12 it was a season long battle with Roy Hood, who beat me by two laps in the final race. I can’t say I have ever been in such a close championship fight where it came down to the last few seconds of the season, but congratulations to Roy a great repeat champion. In the wing racing I had a season long fight with Dale Garcia.  Having never raced wing cars in glue competitively like this before it took a whole season to learn how to use the glue, where to put the stuff and how to get through it. I can say to anyone contemplating wing racing it can be a lot of fun, and something every slot racer should try at some time. I spent all year with Dale in the crosshairs, but just couldn’t get him locked in. Dale, it was fun and I look forward to doing battle again next year.

It is also with some sadness that I must reflect on the loss this year of one of our racers, David Aikens. David was known in SoCal racing mainly for his exploits as a wing racer and was one of the great characters of the series, always being ready to lighten up any situation. He is sadly missed by us all.

Also at this time one of our longtime racers and administrators has decided to scale down his involvement in SoCal racing next year. Gil Rivera has decided this would be his last year as Scale Vice President, and that he will only race at selected events next year before leaving SoCal in the next year or so to move across the country. Gil I can say it has been a great experience working with you this last year, and your contribution to the SoCal USRA is going to be sorely missed. Thank you for all your hard work and effort over many years.

In closing  I just want you to consider your voting today carefully, you are holding the future of SoCal Slot Racing in your hands, please give it the thought that it deserves.

Finally, Happy Holidays and we wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year from both the out going committees and the incoming 2004 committees. See you all at the first race of the new season.

Chris Radisich
2003 SoCal USRA President.