Chesapeake Region
Autocross 2024 All Set By: Greg Hartke
Tell you what… I’m certainly getting the itch to get out to a race and get the adrenaline flowing. The racing season can’t come soon enough for me, that’s for sure! I don’t know about you, but this happens to me every year. The good news is that we’re now on the downhill side to the start of the 2024 Autocross racing season! I’ve been waiting on the folks at Prince George’s Stadium (PGS) to work on my scheduling request (they were holding off, awaiting further direction from the County) and the good news is that the Director of Ticket Operations at PGS contacted me with the needed information in early January and we began to work in earnest on the schedule. Astonishingly, I was able to close negotiations on the AX schedule fairly Venue Date Day Event quickly and am now able PGS 2024-03-30 Saturday Test and Tune to present the 2024 AX PGS 2024-04-13 Saturday AX School schedule: PGS 2024-05-18 Saturday AX#1 PGS PGS PGS PGS PGS PGS
2024-06-01 2024-07-06 2024-07-28 2024-08-31 2024-09-14 2024-10-19
Saturday Saturday Sunday Saturday Saturday Saturday
AX#2 AX#3 AX#4 AX#5 AX#6 AX#7
Scheduling AX is an interesting task because I have to work around the Bowie Baysox home baseball schedule, the Aberdeen Ironbirds home schedule, other events at PGS and Ripken (of which there are many), the Potomac AX schedule, the Chesapeake PCA event schedule (to a certain extent – I only try to work around the really major events), and holidays. All these imposed constraints certainly make the task interesting. My original event schedule proposal was sent to PGS a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving to make sure we were near the top of the priority list for scheduling before the dates from the County came in. Whether that helps or not, I don’t know, but it can’t hurt. As I was negotiating event dates, I was also told that the County was raising the venue rental fee for PGS by $250 per event, to $2750 for Saturday and $2250 for Sunday. With that information in hand, I could put together the budget for AX and found that I was able to hold the line to a fee increase of $5 per event this year. They raised the fee by $500 last year, so I hope this is the last fee increase we see for quite a while. Our AX season can be summarized this way: Test & Tune – a practice event for experienced AX racers only Introduction to Autocross – our annual AX School provides newcomers the opportunity to learn from experienced instructors
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