Meeting Called to order at 7:00 PM

Members in Attendance:
Wayne Armbrust
Paul Anderson
Mike Snyder
Dave Fitzgerald
Shawn Roberts
John Nesbitt
Alan Olson
Lin Toland
Member Absent:
Mike McKee
Guest:
Kate Claffie
Bob Crawford

Minutes of Previous meeting
   Motion: Toland to approve the minutes of the electronic meeting held March 5 th -6 th concerning
appointment of Steve Limbert to Chief of Tech 2nd: Anderson Vote: Unanimous.

Treasurer’s Report:
   Treasurers Report 03.13.2018

In CR Investment Fund as of 02.28.2018 - $747,546.74  
In CR Cash Fund as of 02.28.2018 - $100,209.74
(total Merrill Lynch Funds from both above: $847,756.48
In Solo Fund as of 02.28.2018 - $18,688.61
In Region Checking as of 02.28.2018 - $141,784.36
Current operating balance in Checking Account as of 03/13/2018 - $126,879.15

RE Report
Program Activities:
   Lin Toland and I (mostly Mr Toland) have been working on developing and moving forward with the Memorial Program. We have an outline in place to be presented to the Board for approval. The initial cost for brass name plaques is lower that first estimated. Cost to update to current name list will likely be less than $500. The Club Road Racing budget currently does not have an allocation for the expense. More detail in Lin Toland’s Memorial Program report.
   iHeart Media has filed for bankruptcy reorganization. Our PR contract is continuing. More detail on this issue through Dave Fitzgerald’s report and comments.
   February 27th , I was interviewed as a guest to a radio talk program on WVLT FM 92.1 out of Vineland, NJ. We managed to fill a full hour centered mostly on the Bracket Racing concept with some discussion of Competition Driver School.
   As a member of the NEDiv Spring Meeting review committee I have been watching pre-season activities to see if a Divisional meeting could add anything in the form of an asset to those involved. Consensus seems to be there is no need for another Divisional organizational meeting in the midst of pre-season preparations and activities.
   Three productive meetings held with Chris White of Summit Point MSP over the last month. The appropriate Director Liaisons have the details of the meetings. Some changes being made at Summit Point are going to require the cooperation and support of our volunteer worker staff. All the work and changes are being pushed to be ready for the 2019 season 50 th year celebration. There has been some discussion of advancing capital assistance with conversion of the Washington circuit to a full paved surface. Any further action is pending firming up a construction commitment.
   SCCA TNiA National Grant program turned down the application for economic support of the Bracket Road Racing Series Program. Chuck Edmonson had submitted the request for grant consideration in mid-January. We are still working on any PR angle we can muster.
   Road Racing Program has gained a new Tech Chief as Steve Limbert (National Tech License) has agreed to take on the rebuilding of the WDCR Tech staffing program.

Summit Point Update:

• Summit Point is planning to relocate Worker Camping from its current location to an area in the vicinity of the ‘No Class Paddock’. The new area will include Power.
• Summit Point indicated that when it is built the planned Pavilion will be built in the Worker Camping area.

Club Racing Report
   Wayne and I met with Chris White at the PDX this past weekend to discuss PDX and some other issues. While we were talking Chris shared some plans which Summit has in mind for improvements to the track. They intend to pave much of the back (“no class”) paddock. There are also plans to build some garages in the existing paddock. The proposed pavilion has been delayed while these items are addressed.
   It was also suggested that something be done to honor Bill Scott. After consulting with Greg McDermott and Bob Crawford, the Saturday races (DC Region championship) will be renamed the Bill Scott Championship. Barbara Scott was very pleased to hear about it.
   The spring Competition Driver School will be held the weekend of March 24-25. As of this writing (Sunday the 11th) there were 35 entries.
   The Road Racing committee has offered a season subscription for home MARRS races which will be $1640 for the Summit Point MARRS season. This is a 20% discount if you sign up for all of the races. There will be no refunds if someone misses any of the races.
   The F&C group organized a Race Operations school which was held on February 24 th . There were presentations from all specialties. It was well organized and the presentations were informative.
   Registration for the end of April Majors should open this week.
   Greg has had discussions with the RE of SJR about how to charge SJR for MARRS cars at the two SJR MARRS events and how we would pay SJR for their cars at the two Summit Point JERRC events. It will be difficult to determine who belongs to which series at the beginning. The decision was made for neither region to charge the other for this year while it’s sorted out.

Member Services / PR and Sponsorships
Membership
   As of 2/28/18, WDCR Membership is 2,293 (down 3.1% from last report). The region’s membership is geographically distributed:

• DC – 59
• MD – 949
• VA – 1,037
• WV – 68
• Other – 180

250 regional memberships will expire in March 2018.
174 members have a birthday in March.

Advertising / Marketing
Website
   In the past 30 days there have been 4,570 unique visitors to www.wdrc-scca.org (up 3.8% from last report) and a total of 14,102 page views (down 5.4% from last report).

Marketing
   The iHeart Media radio advertising campaign has been active for 30 days. The current message advertises the Competition School occurring on 3/24/18. The marketing manager for DC101 proposed sending an on-air personality to the PDX on 3/10/18 to experience one of our programs and to discuss it on-air while promoting the upcoming Competition School. Unfortunately, after clearing it with their legal department on the Wednesday before the PDX the personality was no longer available. This timely opportunity was missed and an alternative promotional event is being discussed.
   To measure the effectiveness of this campaign, we are tracking visits to the Competition School page on the WDCR website (718 views or 6.9% of the monthly views) as well as Competition School registrations (35 entrants as of 3/10/18).
   A new radio message will be recorded and released Monday 3/19/18 to promote the upcoming MARRS season and Sprint Bracket Road Racing. The URL racedc.info will be redirected to the SBRR page on the region website.

Long Term Planning Committee
Return to MARRS
   The LTPC members are moving forward with the ‘Return to MARRS’ program and will personally contact members with Competition Licenses who did not register for a WDCR event in 2017. The goal is to entice them back to the Road Racing program with a one-time discount of $100 off a MARRS race (agreed to by Road Racing Director, Greg McDermott). In addition, the LTPC will gather information regarding the member’s activities and reasons for not racing in 2017 and will be provided to the Board at a later date.

MARRS Ambassador
   Outfitting 2-4 volunteers with highly visible shirts to act as mobile information kiosks that would roam the spectating areas and paddock throughout the day answering questions and/or providing information about MARRS and any of the regions programs. The estimated cost is $35/shirt or no more than $150.
   We would also like to create a laminated information card to be used with a WDCR branded
lanyard that is given to all non-members and spectators entering the main gate at Summit Point. This card will have a track map with various points of interest; like where to spectate from, how to get into the paddock, the radio frequency of the race broadcast, our website and a brief intro on all the WDCR programs. We have approximately 75 WDCR branded lanyards left over from the NEDiv convention and will use them with the initial run of 250 laminated cards. The cost for 250 double-sided laminated cards is approximately $215. The original cost for 300 lanyards for the NEDiv convention was $800.
   Both programs could be scaled to work with any of our programs and as such, we would request
the costs to purchase shirts, lanyards and the informational cards to be paid from the regions
PR/Marketing budget.

Motion: Anderson to authorize up to $1000 to the Long Term Planning Committee to purchase MARRS Ambassador shirts, branded lanyards, and spectator info cards. 2nd: Alan Vote: Unanimous.

MARRS Marque Club
   Re-establish relationships with regional car clubs and offer them an opportunity to meet at Summit Point in their own car corral with the possibility of participating in group parade laps during the lunchtime break between races. We would require participation of at least 15 cars to be considered for the weekends marque club. The LTPC will organize the initial event at MARRS 1 and will hand-off the coordination of future events to one of our eager members.

PDX
 The PDX/Track Trial leadership held its annual planning meeting Feb. 17.
 Discussion around the instructor model, informed by a limited supply of instructors and by recent events at other tracks.  Continue with in-car instructor for Novice drivers.  Look at observed instructing or on-demand instructing for more advanced drivers.
 
Provide greater instructor incentives (free track time/events) to keep pace with other organizing groups.
 
Schedule and Tracks – Dominion off the schedule; reconsider if price changes.  Only one event on SP Main in 2018.  This definitely hurts the program.  Promised a second in 2019.
 
Intense discussion of SCCA’s rebranding exercise, and how it affects our program.  We (WDCR) have made a large investment in developing the “PDX brand”.  Decision to keep labelling our events predominately as PDX, with “Track Events” as secondary.
 
Discussion around cross-selling the Region’s various track programs.
 
Discussion around strong need to emphasize customer-friendliness.
 
   First PDX went off wonderfully. Plenty of instructors and students about what was budgeted. Someone dumped some oil on Saturday. The track used 8 bags of oil-dry to clean it up. This is the first year that we have to pay some nominal fee for each bag. Comments from various drivers I spoke with reflected a good time was had by all. Anytime I get cake, it’s a good time!

   Chuck applied for a TNIA grant.  This was not approved.  However, there is some possibility of assistance with marketing and relief on sanction costs.
   Chuck will be contacting another club to possibly invite them to participate with SCCA PDX next year since they may be losing their date.
   I saw Chuck running around with a ladder so I assume a billboard sign was erected but I did not witness this.
   The DC101 Celebrity was not able to attend and an alternative event may be scheduled.

Rally Cross
   After a few curveballs in the off-season we're very pleased to finalize and announce our 2018 schedule! We're extremely excited to return to our home at Summit Point Motorsports Park and we're thrilled to announce the addition of Panthera Training Center as this season's summer venue.
   Schedule changes.
   After checking the site at summit and the weather forecast we canceled the originally scheduled march dates because the surface was not going to hold up well or be fun for the competitors.
   With the new sites we were not able to schedule any of our T&T/school dates that we had originally planned and we ended up having to change the scheduled Aug date but the schedule is now finalized pending any weather related changes.
   Now that the schedule is finalized we opened season subscriptions Friday March 9th and they are selling well.  We currently have 24 season subscribers registered.
   Because we were holding off on opening season subscriptions until the summer schedule was finalized we were able to adjust the cost of the season subscription to take into account the reduced number of events.

Road Rally
Registration is open for the Get the Dust Off Rallye on May 6th.  We are busy prepping for the event and pre-running the route.

Solo
   Solo had their season kickoff meeting on February 17th.
   They've had a few committee members step down, and this has allowed for some new blood to join in and take their places.
   New timing equipment was field tested last season, and now we will be implementing it fully this season.
   Permits are all squared away with PG County and if they do come for inspection it must happen before 8am.
   The early season schools have finally been advertised, but both were almost full without actually posting them to social media. This is a good sign for the other dates we have reserved for possible schools.

Old Business
   Driving Evals
   Driving Evals is a system that shares evaluations of Track Day/HPDE/PDX participants among all the groups that participate in the system. They would be capturing member information from MSR. John Nesbitt and Paul Anderson have been working with the administrator of Driving Evals to devise some form of Non-Disclosure Agreement, which is required by Region policy before access can be granted to our portion of the MSR Database. Work on this continues and Kate Claffie volunteered to assist with the process, she has some experience with Non-Disclosure Agreements.
   Motion: Anderson To allow the participation in Driving Evals pending the development and approval of Non-Disclosure Agreement. 2nd: Olson. Vote: In Favor: Anderson, Snyder, Fitzgerald, Armbrust, Olson, Nesbitt, Roberts Opposed: Lin Toland
   Member Services Committee
   The committee feels there is a need to revisit the makeup of the committee and its responsibilities. The group is responsible for the tracking membership numbers, Public Relations and Sponsorship. The proposed plan was not completed in time to be reviewed at the meeting. Tabled until the April meeting.

Memorial Monument
   Lin Toland, with assistance from Wayne Armbrust has developed a plan of action to bring the Memorial back up to date and a way forward to keep it up to date on annual basis. After discussion there were a few tweaks proposed. Consensus was to review the plan and make some suggested changes for review at the next meeting. Tabled until the April Meeting.

New Business
   John Nesbitt
   Director Nesbitt advised the Board that he will be relocating out of the area within the next few months. The Board is seeking candidates to fill the remainder of his Term.
   Triple-T Series
   The Triple-T Series is a Series for SRF3 Drivers being run independent of any Region, but awarding points based on races primarily at Summit Point and New Jersey Motorsports Park. The organizer and sponsor of the Series Mr. Steven Thomas has asked the Region to make available a free season pass for the 2019 season to be awarded to one of the Top 3 Drivers in the overall championship. This was deferred to the RRC for consideration.
   Track Night in America:
   Track Night in America has four dates set for their events at Dominion Raceway: 19 April, 17 May,21 June & 26 July, it is felt that some form of WDCR Presence would be desired considering it is being held in our region. Alan Olson will work with Wayne Armbrust to represent the Region at the initial event and as many as possible after that.
   Awards Banquet
   The Board held a general discussion on the Banquet and it is the consensus of the Board that we attempt another Luncheon style event in January. We need to recruit a chair person(s) to move forward with this.
   Annual Membership Meeting
   The Board discussed the requirement to identify a venue and schedule the Annual Membership Mtg. In keeping with the rotation of the last several years the 2018 membership meeting should be held on the West Side of the Beltway. The RE indicated he would make some calls to see if he could capture a venue for the meeting.

Motion to Adjourn: Anderson 2 nd : Fitzgerald, Vote Unanimous.
Meeting ended: 8:35