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Today we are releasing four major updates that have me super excited. You might remember back in August when we gave you a sneak peak to a major change to the look and feel of MotorsportReg. It's here today, along with much more.

This week I'm near Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin - not to attend an event at Road America (drats!) - but rather for our annual team meetup in Lake Geneva. As a fully remote team we find a late summer week to bring the team together, review our progress and refine our plan for the future. It's a chance to replace phone calls and emoji with face-to-face conversations and meals that leaves us energized to keep pushing forward.

Last month I listed a number of improvements for my programmer friends but I'm back with a larger-than-normal list of improvements and fixes to MotorsportReg, including a sneak peek at a major new feature. 

In this feature recap, I want to give a shout out to my developer and programmer friends who hack during the week and drive, ride, kart or organize on nights and weekends. This episode is all for you as I'm going to detail a number of open source and API updates as well as a free Wordpress theme just for motorsports.

Flexibility is what MotorsportReg is all about. You build your tribe with a particular experience that is everything from where you promote your events to how you greet people at the event to how you treat folks who run afoul of your rules. You can customize large parts of the data you gather with MotorsportReg including the person and attendee profiles using our custom question functionality but one category has remained static: vehicles.  

A personal goal this year is to improve my communication with what's changed in MotorsportReg. As you may have seen on the blog and on the site, we've added a couple of people to our team which means things will begin changing at a faster (and better) rate. That means I need to tell you more frequently about the changes both obvious and not-so-obvious. Let's catch up with a series of blog posts starting today.

Record-breaking year sees 207,000 registrations; growing interest in motorsports

The reports on the death of car culture have been greatly exaggerated.  Contrary to studies showing a declining interest in driving, MotorsportReg.com has logged a record 2014, registering more events per participant and setting a new highwater mark of 207,000 amateur motorsport participants, an increase of 15.3% over the prior year.

“While headlines cover struggling spectator events and fewer licensed teen drivers, participatory motorsport events are growing. We’ve seen a 15.3% year-over-year increase in total participants and a steady increase in the number of events each person attends annually,” explained Founder Brian Ghidinelli. “When it comes to getting off the couch and starting the engine, more people are doing it and they’re doing it more often. Amateur motorsport as a whole is not only alive but thriving.”

Twenty-fourteen was a record breaking year for us - more organizations and more registrations than ever before.  We spent a lot of our winter thinking about the future for MotorsportReg and how we make it easier and more fun to organize, find and attend events.

We have some hiring to do in order to execute on that vision and our first opening is for a senior developer who loves building great software. This is a full-time, fully-remote opportunity to have a big impact on the future of MotorsportReg.

We would love to hire from within our community so please share this with talented people you know!  Full details and application are on ourjob description page.

With the holidays quickly approaching we threw together a gift giving guide for the road racer, karter, autocrosser, HPDE'er or all around car nut in your life.  Or if you happen to be one of those people, send this list to your family so they know what you REALLY want for the holidays. You can thank us later.

Many people don't realize but we make changes to MSR all the time - as frequent as multiple times per day.  Each update adds or improves the service and fixes bugs.  Many of these changes are small in nature so when Jennifer asks me, "What did you do recently?", it can feel like there's nothing newsworthy to pass along.  Thankfully I have a number of significant changes which makes writing this update a lot easier!

I instructed recently for a new program organized by the Golden Gate Chapter of the BMW CCA.  For those keeping notes, GGC was the club for whom I built the original prototype of MSR back in 2002.

GGC has a successful ladder system that moves participants from low-cost, low-commitment entry-level activities like car control clinics to higher-cost and higher-commitment events like autocross and HPDEs.  The challenge they have faced is keeping advanced drivers in their program. Some go on to club racing, some become instructors, but others simply get lost in the vast wilderness that is "open track days".

If you're brainstorming solutions to this problem, you might throw out ideas like more track time, better instructors, or more liberal passing, to help retain those experienced students. Those might work but lots of groups do that.  GGC tried something totally different.  They purchased 7 GPS-based data acquisition units and invited 7 instructors with racing and data acquisition experience (who could translate the squiggly lines into meaningful instruction) to create a personalized "Advanced+" offering.  An increased entry fee bought the use of the data system, one-on-one coaching and double the track time to apply and learn from the intensive instruction.