MotorsportReg.com Blog

Mark

MotorsportReg.com Welcomes Miller Motorsports Park

June 11, 2013 by Mark

TOOELE VALLEY, UTAH (March 17, 2009) — As is fitting for a state-of-the-art motorsports facility, Miller Motorsports Park is now offering a state-of-the-art online registration process for participants in its local racing series and the Miller Performance Training Center.

Miller Motorsports Park has teamed up with MotorsportReg.com to offer our racers and students a simple, secure and stress-free means of registering for races and schools. Registrants can pay online via credit card and will still need to check in at the Box Office upon arrival at the track, but the wait will be much less and the entire process will be much more efficient. In addition, when a registrant registers for any subsequent event, their data will already exist in the system and the process will be streamlined even further.

“We are very pleased to be able to offer online registration to our racers and students,” said Ty Pursley, MMP Box Office and Group Sales Manager. “This is something we have wanted to do since the track opened in 2006, and in MotorsportReg.com we now have a partner who can help us make this a seamless experience for our customers.”

“MotorsportReg.com is proud to be the registration solution for Miller Motorsports Park,” said Brian Ghidinelli, company founder. “We are excited to partner with this world-class facility and look forward to streamlining the registration experience for Miller customers.”

Go to the following links and create a user profile to get registered for available upcoming events. To register for a driving school with the Miller Performance Training Center, please visit www.MillerPerformanceTrainingCenter.MotorsportReg.com. To register for Open Track Days or to enter races in the Miller Park Racing Association, Masters of the Mountains Series, Utah Supermoto Championship, Icebreaker Kart Championship presented by HeritageWest Credit Union or Utah Kart Championship Series, please visit www.MMP.MotorsportReg.com. Registrants can still refer to www.MillerMotorsportsPark.comm for event details and be directed to the appropriate link for online registration.

For tickets or information regarding Miller Motorsports Park, call 435-277-RACE (7223) or visit the track’s website at www.MillerMotorsportsPark.com.

John Gardner

Media Manager

Miller Motorsports Park

2901 N. Sheep Lane

Tooele, UT 84074

Office: 435.277.8101

Cell: 704.467.1424

FAX: 435.277.8008

Email: jgardner@millermotorsportspark.com

Web: www.millermotorsportspark.com

Topics: Customers

Insurance, Again

June 11, 2013 by Mark

The New York Times ran a story this past weekend about the ongoing industry trend to limit insurance coverage for incidents that occur at driving schools. This is not a new issue for any of us, of course, but the article does a nice job of explaining the problem and includes some interesting anecdotes from insurance brokers. For example:

American, like other insurers who have tried the [motorsports] insurance, ran into a series of hurdles. To attract a pool of clients and spread risk, the policies were priced low — an average of $500 to $750 a year, Ms. Bergan said. The number of claims wasn’t a problem, but the cost of the claims was. “Most of the claims were total losses,” she said.

Ms. Bergan's comment does not reflect the data we collected from a wide range of event organizers as we worked with Lockton Affinity to put the HPDE Insurance Program together over the last year or so. Our conclusion was that, given a set of professionally run educational events, the overall incident rate is very low and the magnitude of the incidents that occur is also relatively small. However, every program is different and American Collector's varied from the HPDE Insurance Program in some key ways.

Sadly, the NY Times article also chose to omit any information about the HPDE Insurance Program that would have balanced the negativity of the industry situation (other than a mention as an insurance supplier in the sidebar), in spite of the reporter having spent time on the phone with our partner at Lockton Affinity, Ryan Staub.

The entire NY Times article can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/automobiles/19INSURE.html

So far, the HPDE Insurance Program has been an unmitigated success with over 250 policies sold since the program launched at the end of July, demonstrating that there is definite demand from the motorsports enthusiast community and that driving school participants are more than willing to pay for peace of mind.

In the end, though, we applaud the NY Times for giving coverage to both a sport and a situation that gets very little attention. Here's to hoping that options like the HPDE Insurance Program keep our industry growing!

You can find additional information about the HPDE Insurance Program, as well as purchase coverage online, here.

June 11, 2013 by Mark

Because motorsports for us is as much about the people as it is about the cool toys, we pick a couple of charity events each year to support by waiving the 1.5% MSR fees on registrations. This year we helped a new client, Florida Karting Championship Series, raise over $20,000 for Victory Junction Gang Camp.

We could not be more proud of what our friends at FKCS have accomplished and we are happy to have played our small part in it.

The complete story about the event is posted on eKartingNews.com. More information about Victory Junction Gang Camp is available at their website.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this event a success!

June 11, 2013 by Mark

Fun badge from SlideShowPro.net

After many months of Brian coding his fingers down to nubbins, the next major evolution of the MotorsportReg.com Eventmaster360 motorsports management platform has gone Beta. We are very excited about this release as it both fulfills some major feature requests by competitive event organizations (such as a Permanent Number Manager and Order Form Dependencies) and also brings many, many smaller enhancements that will improve the experience for everyone who uses it.

We are particularly proud of the flexibility of the Permanent Number Manager, which allows organizers to enforce number uniqueness on a class, event, year, etc basis. It will even allow sharing of number pools across organizations in support of cross-regional or cross-divisional events.

The new order form has been streamlined both for the organizer as well as for the attendee, leveraging a lot of Javascript to make it as interactive and seamless as possible. Organizers can now set requirements such as "if you order Package A, you must also order Package B", which should go a long way toward eliminating incorrect orders and after-the-fact package editing, as well as associate questions and actions with packages directly instead of just placing them generically at the top of the page.

Our newly revamped Who's Attending feature can now optionally list car make/model, class, and sponsor and can be made publicly visible so potential attendees can scope out the competition before they sign up. We've also updated the Email Blaster with a much slicker UI that makes communicating with your members and attendees easier than ever.

This release includes some new technologies under the hood, too, which will speed development of new features. Once the Beta period is over and we are live with the new code, we'll be starting in on Round 2 of our To Do List. Next up is Deferred Payment Processing, which will allow organizers to collect payment information at the time of registration but not actually process the dollars until some arbitrary later date. Defered Payment Processing will be an industry-first in motorsports!

And wait until you see what we've got tee'd up after that!

We are in the home stretch of a process that began in mid-2007, so please bear with us as we finish up the last bit of bug hunting and code polishing. Look for MotorsportReg.com to gain some fantastic new features in a matter of days.

Topics: Misc, Features

Meeting The SCCA In San Antonio

June 11, 2013 by Mark

As many of you know, we've got some pretty amazing new features coming soon that will really benefit competitive organizations who use MotorsportReg.com. Things like Deferred Payment Processing (to prevent refunds), Order Form Dependencies (to account for required compliance fees, etc), and a Permanent Number Manager will bring a new level of efficiency to competitive event administration.

With these features solidly under development, we here at Pukka Software headed out to the SCCA National Conference in San Antonio Texas in early February to demonstrate MotorsportReg.com to SCCA Region administrators from across the country. The response from these hard-working volunteers was fantastic and we truly enjoyed getting to know SCCA people from other parts of USA. Our SCCA customers here on the West Coast, San Francisco Region and Oregon Region, had nice things to say about us in their Inter-Region Cooperation session and we very much appreciate their support and encouragement.

One thing that struck both Brian and me was the incredible dedication to the club that SCCA members and volunteers exhibit. The sense of community was overwhelming and it was a particular privilege to be in attendance at the awards ceremony on the last night at which a variety of volunteers were honored. Several SCCA luminuaries including Kjell Qvalle were inducted into the SCCA Hall of Fame and Kjell was kind enough to share some memories of his many decades in motorsports. A truly amazing experience all the way around. We would particularly like to thank the SCCA Events team headed by Melissa Flesher for taking such good care of all the vendors - you guys made us feel very welcome. Brian and I are both proud to be SCCA members and we look forward to serving the club for many years.

Speaking of serving, we are happy to welcome a few new SCCA regions to MotorsportReg.com. SCCA South Bend Region has come aboard, as have Central Kentucky Region, Kansas City Region, Mississippi Region, and Southern Indiana Region.

Outside of the Sports Car Club of America, the Badger Chapter of the Audi Club of North America has begun using MotorsportReg.com, as have Adare Motorsports and Cascade Sports Car Club up in the Pacific Northwest.

Thanks to everyone for their support. We look forward to serving you through 2008 and beyond!

June 11, 2013 by Mark

Given that I've been a part of Pukka Software for well over a year now, it's probably time to introduce myself to those of you that I've not spoken with yet. My name is Mark Dadgar and I'm a motorsports junkie. As a long time user of MotorsportReg.com and an even longer-time eventmaster, I joined Brian to help bring these fantastic tools to the widest array of clubs and organizations possible. I'm primarily responsible for customer support, sales, and marketing, but given the can-do attitude here at Pukka Software, I'm happy to pitch in wherever my skills are needed.

Since we're talking about recent additions to the MotorsportReg.com family, we'd like to welcome some new organizations to the fold. Audi Club North America has come onboard with their National-office sponsored Steamboat Winter Driving school plus ACNA Florida brings their driving events program as well. Two large and well-respected Porsche Club of America regions, North Country and Northern New Jersey, bring their active and enthusiastic members to the MotorsportReg.com community and they are joined by SCCA Las Vegas, too. Up in the Pacific Northwest, BMW CCA Puget Sound chapter and the Northwest Alfa Romeo Club have adopted our tools to streamline their programs. Independent organizations Touring Car Racing Association and ProAutoSports also recognized the benefits we provide and signed on with us early in 2008, joined by Northeast SHO Club over on the Right Coast as well.

To all our new clients, thank you for the trust you put in us and Welcome Aboard! It's going to be a great year!

June 11, 2013 by Mark

2006 is really the first year we've been serious about sales and marketing. When I say we, I mean "me", because I'm the person in charge of it. My expertise is primarily in product management and user experience work so the touchy-feely side of sales is difficult for a once-upon-a-time-engineer like myself.

Over the past months, I've been trading emails and phone calls with organizers from around the country. We've been having great traction but the perceived cost of the service has been a deal-breaker for some groups despite the fact that our only service charge is for online payments.

We've seen the most skeptical organizer become a cheerleader after using MotorsportReg.com, but we won't have any cheerleaders until they try it. We need to find a way to get more people into a trial.

So... we're considering giving away a version of our service without online payments for free - or close to it. This would let organizers for next to nothing obtain all of the benefits of electronic pre-registration without incorporating any financial overhead.

We think people will see the benefits of integrated online payment and eventually upgrade.

Would you try our service without online payments for free? What about for some nominal fee like $25?