Organize awesome events.Our all-in-one event management software keeps organizers sane & attendees happy.

Dear MotorsportReg Community,

Greetings Event Organizers! The next time you log into your Hagerty MSR account, you’ll be prompted to accept new user terms. We know that new terms can lead to concern or confusion, so we want to give you a simple breakdown on what’s really being updated.  

The results are in: The annual Hagerty Motorsports Participation Survey is complete. This year’s survey looked at topics including overall events, gas prices, inflation, what kind of events are increasing in popularity and which are on the wane, as well as a few of the reasons why people might be participating more this year. 

Checking our phones for notifications, texts, and alerts has become almost an unconscious act for many. It’s not exactly controversial to say that smartphones are heavily relied upon in some form for nearly all facets of our day-to-day activities. 

We’re excited to share that we’ve recently added a new role to the Hagerty MotorsportReg team, which we hope you’ll view as an extension of your team.

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. 

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.

To all the organizations who trust MotorsportReg, you just hit a major milestone years in the making: we processed your 2 millionth event registration! This milestone is no small feat. Two million participants have lived out their passion for motorsport through an event that you've organized. We congratulate you on your contribution to the sport and for creating a place for all of us to get our adrenaline fix and create lifelong friendships.

What's next? Together we’re partnering on a mission to accelerate the growth of the motorsport events community. Leveraging our tools, you've registered record numbers of people for motorsport events this year. Six highlights worth sharing:

1. Your events reached more than 1,000,000 web visitors on the MotorsportReg calendar and 1,300,000 inboxes via our monthly "Upcoming Events" emails.
2. You brought back 10% more people to your registration form using our abandoned registration emails that detect when someone leaves the registration form.
3. You filled over $100,000 of unsold seats using our Last Minute Track Junkies list, growing your contact list and keeping your events financially in the black.
4. You added 115,000 new names when people opt-in to your contact database before they view your registration forms.
5. You sent your members and customers 5,000,000 emails keeping them up to date and encouraging them to register for your events. Five million touch points!
6. All combined, our tools with your passion have increased average participation! The number of events attended per person per year has grown annually by 2.6%. Each of your average participants are attending 13% more of your events today than 5 years ago.

These are just a few of the ways that we support you in your mission to grow the motorsport events community. Our team is constantly finding new ways to automate tasks, reduce errors, and increase participation in your events. These tenets are at the core of every new feature we deliver and we're excited to see what you accomplish next! 

Back on April 24th Jonathan Guzzo signed up for an autocross with the Golden Gate Chapter of the BMW CCA and became our 1.5 millionth registration! Very proud moment for all of us here at MotorsportReg and fitting that it came from our very first customer way back in 2002- the Golden Gate Chapter. 

Pass me the champagne! This is like winning LeMans, the Indy 500, the Monaco Grand Prix and Daytona 500!

Okay maybe that's getting a little carried away, but we are super excited over here.

We started out with 1 registration for one driving school. Now we've got 222,831 driver school registrations under our belt plus 777,169 more for everything from club races to karting and motorcycle schools to rallies.

It takes a lot of clubs, a lot of events, a lot of organizers and a TON of participants to hit that number and we thank each and every one of you 1 million times over. 

Below is the press release we issued this morning announcing our major milestone. Now on to the next million...