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big opportunity.
The government, both local and state, have started to work with us, and it’ s been a challenge at times to reach out to some of these elected officials and get them to work with us. We were bringing good revenue to the local economy, but now the whole state is benefiting from it. Now North Florida’ s benefiting from it because people are flying into Tallahassee and they’ re flying into Jacksonville. Now we can reach out to our neighboring state and they’ d be willing to work with us because we’ re bringing local economic benefits to them as well.
RM: The World Cup Finals, the largest event we do, we are at capacity, so the NHRA race won’ t be bigger than that because we can’ t physically hold any more than what we hold for that event. World Cup is the template we’ re using for all of our logistics here: food, parking, things like that. As far as the facility stuff goes, NHRA is going to handle what they’ re going to put where, and all those kind of things.
I own a farm next door that we
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use for parking. We have a great relationship with the motocross track next door to us. During their National, we provide space and the logistics for their event, and they are, in kind, doing it for the NHRA event and the World Cup. So for that reason, we have enough parking for the capacity of seating.
This is just one more major event that we add to our facility here, which increases economic impact in the region, and notoriety, as far as the visibility of the raceway to new companies and racers that run national events only. Those are all pluses. We have a great relationship with our community and our county government. We are seen as an asset and not a liability with the powers-to-be.
JP: I’ d say a challenge that we’ re running into right now – and it’ s not just because of the national event, it’ s just the overall switch – is all of the different personnel within NHRA that we deal with now. I went 24 years dealing with the same people at IHRA / WDRA, and now I’ ve got to learn everybody. I think,
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“ This is in the best interest of the [ Rockingham ] area because we are the biggest draw. NASCAR has one race a year. We have events every single week.”
— Dan VanHorn
“ Who do I call for this? Who do I call for that?”
We’ re dealing with the local bracket program, but we’ re also dealing with the Lucas Oil race and then dealing with national events. We have been in meetings
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after meetings after meetings, one, just trying to learn who everybody is, and then two, trying to figure out how to put the event on, where to park racers, what classes are going to come, etc. So that’ s been the biggest challenge so far.
The biggest benefit so far is that we’ re able to get better sponsorship dollars for signage, both with our local sponsors and then bigger corporate organizations, just because we’ re hosting a national event on national TV.
DVH: The biggest challenge is just the financial side of it. All the renovations that have to happen to the facility. The concrete grandstand was the one project that we’ re like,“ We’ re just never going to be able to afford that.” We couldn’ t justify it because outside of national events, you don’ t need 13,000 seats on that side of the track for 99 % of our events. It was really just a small part of the long-term vision of what do we need to do to make this make financial sense.
The financial pressure of getting all the other things in place, such
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