What Happend at USPKS at NC

[Ed Rodgers]

USPKS had 105 entries?  Is that right?  What happened?  I think F series had 220 a few weeks ago at NC?  What is up…USPKS was doing well and starting to be the lead series in the East.  Too many series?  I know we skipped USPKS to run ROK Cup Midwest.  Thoughts

It is clear Yamaha is dead at National level…

 

 

 

[Timothy Strawkas]

Its only one race, I wouldn’t read to much into it.

[TJ Koyen]

The Rok race hurt entries a bit probably. Still quality fields if the numbers weren’t quite as strong! The 27 kart KA field was nuts! And X30 had good racing as well, in senior and junior. The next race will be bigger I imagine.

USPKS is doing a great job introducing new things to build the sport and help the racer with some rules-revamping, the drop down bumper, and the KA engine package. Glad to see the forward progress.

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[Derek.White]

I would speculate it has a lot to do with the time of the year; kids are still in school. Combine that with too many series at the top level competing for a pretty small percentage of racers and you get lousy turnouts. Just look at the results of the WKA Winter Cup at Ocala two weekends ago, 67 karts total. And now I read today there’s talk of a Skusa Winter Cup, seems like trying to extract more blood from the stone to me.

On a positive note I was at New Castle yesterday for their second club race of the season, 191 entries by my count. Goes to show grass roots racing (LO206 made up about 90 of those entries between 3 classes) and affordable entry fees will still draw big numbers.

[Gary Lawson]

Ncmp had in the 250s yesterday Derek. 272 last week.

[Xander Clements]

Rok took a big hit in terms of Junior, Mini, and Micro. Also, there’s a lot of unknown in the east in general right now as teams are debating on whether to support WKA or USPKS since this year many seem like they longer want to do both.

Also, F-Series has a niche group of club-level racers who race in F-Series instead of their club because they reside in the NYC area. It’s almost a completely different group of people.

[Tim Koyen]

I think Xander covered it pretty well.  The pot of gold that used to exist in Florida over the winter was too tempting, so you got a bunch of new (and existing) series trying to take a slice of that pie.  That was burning up many racing budgets before the grass even turned green in the upper half of the country.  That problem seems to be rectifying itself, as the overabundance of winter series caused them all to struggle this year, and obviously they won’t all be back next year.  I would expect the dynamic in FL during the winter to be fluid and continue to evolve as we see who all can afford a winter series in 2018.

Meanwhile, USPKS numbers were not up, but they were also not really down.  It was about the same as last year.  Many clubs are outdrawing the traveling series by a large margin and I would expect that trend to continue for now.  2017 is going to be a year of change in US karting, no doubt about it.  You will see weaker series contracting or going away, and stronger series taking steps to solidify their position.  Hopefully those that emerge will come out strong and continue to put on great racing programs so we can all get our fix.

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[Derek.White]

Gary Lawson wrote:

Ncmp had in the 250s yesterday Derek. 272 last week.

Nice! Happy to have added those up wrong. Must have overlooked a few of the 2nd races for the same class when I was going through it on race monitor.

Those are incredible turnouts for a club series. I’d venture to guess that it would be an eye opening experience for the guys at Pitt Race to present them with KRA’s business model, cost structure, etc and resulting turnout. Maybe they’d think twice about being so hyper focused on rentals and see the value of building a strong club series. But that’s a bit off topic…

 

 

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