bart, i guess i was either misinformed or simply read past posts incorrectly in assuming that endurance was always a cheaper race to enter than the others. as far as "thinking" it was a value class, it's not about thinking it, it simply was (is) because it has in the last few years been cheaper to race endurance than sprints.

i do think though if suddenly endurance is priced up the same as all the rest of the sprints, the club is going to lose a lot of endurance entries. not mine necessarily, but if the club is trying to figure out how to increase revenue and increase the numbers of racers, increasing the price of endurance to equal of sprints will not likely have the effect that the board is looking for, which is to increase revenue. but then again, maybe it does, i don't know. but if the increase in price is offset by a decrease in racers, then the club comes out the same and the revenue problem is not solved. what i proposed was what i thought was a good balance between raising revenue and also getting endurance close to the price of sprints, while not suddenly raising one group of racers fees by double or more. and again, the rough numbers i proposed have the potential of adding $20k in revenue to the club while still hopefully keeping endurance racers in the fold.

i guess the question to the board is this, and the answer should dictate the cost to race endurance: simply, does the board want endurance to be priced the same as all the other races, or does the board want to leave it as a slightly less expensive option to sprints? if the board wants it to be priced in line with the other races like you think it should be, than by all means, this discussion is mute and the board should just raise the fees.

but the issue before the club is how to best raise revenue, not how to be most "fair" to sprint racers. of course, these are tied together because of the endurance pricing, and again, what i proposed earlier is simply giving endurance guys a minimal break on their second race. my guess is that if all of this was reversed and sprints were historically cheaper, and the club was proposing raising sprint fees by over 100% if you raced 2 sprints, holy shit there would be some uproar. maybe if the goal is also to get endurance priced the same as the other racers, perhaps it could be a phased increase so that next year it goes up by x% and then the next year it goes up a bit more, so that eventually all the races come out about the same.

but i do want to add that a lot of people seem to equate minutes of track time with cost, so by this logic, endurance should cost twice as much as sprints right? so i think we need to lose the laps per minute argument because that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in this context.

bottom line again, i think all endurance racers are ok with a pretty significant price increase based on people's response on the forums, but don't put the entire financial burden of increasing revenue on the endurance racers. raise endurance fees by 50% or whatever, raise sprints by $5 or whatever feels right and go for it and see where the chips fall. if endurance entries stay the same, then clearly it was a good decision. if revenue stays flat or doesn't increase as much as it needs to next year, obviously revisiting the issue will be necessary.