To many people, a helmet is just the thing that protects your head. But there is a cottage industry of artisans that use helmets as the raw material to create works of fine art that just-so-happen to double as safety equipment.

Custom-painted helmets can take upwards of 40 hours for disassembly, design, paint, and reassembly before seeing action on track. They are incredible labors of love created by craftsmen around the globe. In this second edition of our global list, we've highlighted twenty of the best and their most stunning designs ranging from amateur karting to Formula 1.

Around headquarters at MotorsportReg, we talk a lot about the Nurburgring. A lot. (We even wrote a book on how to visit, spectate, drive and race the Ring, if you're curious) Whenever a new hot lap is laid down, we immediately share it on Slack and sit tensely on the edge of our chairs watching supercars race flat out in 6th and 7th gears.

We're sharing our favorites (updated from 10 to 12!): a curated list of the fastest laps on the Nurburgring Nordschleife. If you can only watch three, I would recommend the #5 NIO EP9 (electric car!), #1 Porsche 919 Hybrid Evo (Millenium Falcon warpspeed-fast!) and the extra BONUS clip we included at the bottom (oversteer!)

As the world begins to emerge from COVID-19 lockdowns, people are asking how they can return to their normal lives including hobby activities. We believe you should follow all applicable government rules but also exercise personal caution. We all love the cars, motorcycles and karts that attracted us to motorsport but the people are why we stick around. 

Over the last six months, we’ve been on a mission to reduce the steps and complexity that it takes to set your events live. In December we released enhancements to event cloning and Entry Packages to reduce the number of items you add to your forms. 

MotorsportReg.com, RaceHero and Hagerty are hiring and we would love you to join our team! A great company with great benefits aligned to save driving and grow the sport make this more than just a job. We are looking for enthusiasts to help in two roles:

Last quarter we announced that we would be converting our paid White Label Website add-on to a free feature. The White Label Website keeps your name and logo front and center through the entire registration process–from first click to the registration confirmation.

Premium plan customers can sign in now and setup their own White Label Website.

Great news - we are converting our paid White Label Website add-on to a free feature on our Premium plan! 

As we roll out the update, clubs, racetracks and sanctioning bodies can choose a custom URL and upload a logo to enable a complete White Label Website. From first click, to registration form, to payment and confirmation screens, the branded site keeps the organization name and logo at the top throughout the customer experience when buying a membership, applying for a license or registering for an event. 

Customers who switch to MotorsportReg always report a bump in registration counts. We knew our tools and promotion played a part in growing participation but we never knew how much - until now.

Using nine months of click data, I analyzed how attendees find and register for your events and learned something surprising: most of our clubs, racetracks and sanctioning bodies are using MotorsportReg for free. 😮

Fresh off becoming part of the Hagerty family, we've headed to cold, frozen and snowy Traverse City, Michigan to spend the week together at our new headquarters. We're meeting our peers and plotting joint efforts for 2019 and beyond.

Roadmap Series

Your response over the last two weeks to our acquisition was overwhelming - we really felt the love! I had so many wonderful calls and emails with the opportunity to share our plans. I was thrilled to hear your enthusiasm match my own and understand how you'll benefit.

I want everyone to hear that same message so I'll be writing here on the present and future state of MotorsportReg. You will see how we plan to further help you automate tasks, improve accuracy and grow participation in a series covering:

• Marketplace performance - how we fill your events today and in the future
• Roadmap: Refining the core - improving existing features
• Roadmap: Streamline and innovate - making event day more seamless
• Roadmap: Scaling participation - growing your audience and attendance
• Roadmap: White-label registration - keeping your brand front and center

Each piece will dive into what you have told us is important and how we plan to respond.

Hiring

One of the most direct benefits to you is expanding our team to better service you and your attendees. It took a decade to get to ten full-time people and our framework calls for doubling that by the end of 2020.

Keep your eyes peeled for openings in a variety of roles soon. We love bringing on fellow enthusiasts to move us forward and hope you'll apply!

Customers, friends and fellow enthusiasts -

I have big news to share - today we are announcing that Hagerty has acquired MotorsportReg.com and RaceHero. The entire team, including myself, is staying in place and there is no change to our commitment to helping you organize awesome events or protecting your data. What will change is our ability to lean on Hagerty's resources to accelerate everything we do and deliver value to you more quickly in the form of automating tasks, improving accuracy and growing participation.

This is a major milestone for our customers, the team and me personally. It's been 16 years since I built a prototype to solve my own needs as a track day organizer with the Golden Gate Chapter of the BMW CCA.

What began as a hobby (and let's be honest, a tax write-off for my own racing - thanks Dad!) became a 12-person company managing 40,000 events and 2,000,000 registrations for two software-as-a-service apps. We did it without any funding, bootstrapping from revenue and obsessively solving the needs of event organizers. None of that would have been possible without the great team who joined me on this journey starting with Ann Maycock in 2009. Few teams - funded or not - ever achieve this success and I hope they are as proud of themselves as I am of them.

Although bootstrapping has been a wonderful challenge, it also slowed us down. We have been drowning in great opportunities that we simply haven't had the people or hours in the day to tackle. That's what drew my interest when Hagerty called.

While many of you know them for their classic car insurance, Hagerty is really an automotive lifestyle brand that motorsport enthusiasts love too. You can rent a classic or exotic car on their AirBnb-for-cars platform DriveShare. They offer HPDE insurance to protect your car on track. You can learn what a car is worth using their valuation database before buying or selling. You can join the Hagerty Driver's Club which features the world's 3^rd largest automotive magazine, roadside assistance with guaranteed flatbed towing, and gearhead-oriented discounts like Griot's Garage and Skip Barber racing schools. Or you can join their online community led by racers-turned-writers from prestigious backgrounds such as Road & Track and Car and Driver magazines.

We didn't know any of those things when Hagerty first approached us. But each conversation kept revealing more opportunities where we had overlapping objectives and unique strengths. Their growth mindset and obsession with customer service convinced us that they were the right partner at the right time who could help us accomplish outcomes we couldn't achieve on our own.

To be clear, we didn't decide to sell. We decided to sell to Hagerty. There's an important difference. Our mission to connect event organizers and participants so they can live out their passion for motorsport fits completely within Hagerty's goal of creating a movement of 6 million enthusiasts by 2025 who will preserve car and motorsport culture for future generations. Unlike previous unsolicited inquiries, Hagerty didn't want to pillage our mailing list or aggregate our payment processing. Their executive team has great admiration for what we've built and want it to expand because people and vehicles coming together at events are the cornerstone of car and motorsport culture.

So, what happens now? It's mostly business-as-usual... with a turbo. Hagerty's 12-person marketing team will begin promoting your events to their audience (which reaches 10x more people!) to generate even more new members and participants. Our support number and email stay the same. Our team will quickly grow to extend our lead on delivering the world's best software and support for clubs, racetracks and sanctioning bodies. I signed a 5-year agreement to be the Managing Director of Hagerty Motorsport and continue obsessively solving your problems.

Back in 2003, I had no expectation this would ever be a business, let alone a business someone else would want to buy. It's incredibly humbling and impossible to sufficiently express my gratitude in a blog post so I hope we will meet at an event in the future. In the meantime, I want to thank every event organizer who has trusted us whether you are the Golden Gate Chapter - still with us 16 years later - or you just signed on last week. Being part of Hagerty uniquely positions us to be your partner in tackling the challenges ahead so you can keep following your passion in all forms of motorsport and have fun doing it.

If you have questions, I am hosting a Facebook Live Ask Me Anything tomorrow, Friday April 5th at 9:00am Pacific time at https://facebook.com/MotorsportReg. I invite you to come chat with me then. Otherwise, you can also contact our team and we will - as always - get you squared away.