Mark,
It is not about the politics, it was when OSS started, but after a year of which many people thought they would fail, they achieved thier goal. Now if you dont run Super Cat, SCL, or Super Vee, SVL, Then yes there are other choices to make as to which groups you care to support, but as a fan, watching one boat race itself is boring, and while no one organization is perfect where is the draw for the fans if there isnt a fleet of at least 5 boats per class???

Glad to see you guys all had a good time in KW, hope all your holidays a good,
12 more days til I get home!!!

Posted by Pete B

"Mark,
It is not about the politics, it was when OSS started, but after a year of which many people thought they would fail, they achieved thier goal. Now if you dont run Super Cat, SCL, or Super Vee, SVL, Then yes there are other choices to make as to which groups you care to support, but as a fan, watching one boat race itself is boring, and while no one organization is perfect where is the draw for the fans if there isnt a fleet of at least 5 boats per class???

Glad to see you guys all had a good time in KW, hope all your holidays a good,
12 more days til I get home!!!"


Pete

You call 2 races achieving a goal? And they had to foot the bill for both of those races and the 2 that they went and raced with the GLGCS. I would love to see the balance sheet for that business. I agree they proved their point , but if you havent figured out Bob Bull is the man of APBA and MA is yesterdays news. What is their point now? I respect each and every racer that races that circuit, I have looked up to them from the day i came into this wonderful sport. They hopefully will succeed, but time and time again in this sport, due to egos and beliefs, someone breaks away starts thier own organization, only to fail within 2-3 years. How many races will actually be raced this year? They have an impressive schedule as they did last year, but only 2 came thru, oops excuse me 4 because Great Lakes bailed their asses out.

The name of this thread is "Racers Wake Up" and Eddie Smyth as well as others bring up a lot of great points. With the exception of one OSS official(@the drivers meeting) we all left our egoes in Miami and came together and raced. It was a beautiful thing. Your right Pete come to think of it, they did succeed, they succeeded in dividing this sport even more than it was.

APBA will always be there, SBI will always be there, they arent going anywhere. Please Pete all I ask is to promote boat racing coming together and not further division.

Trent Weyant

Bill France started out as a broke ass hillbilly...... His money comes from the Speedway corporation and the Nascar organization that his father started.

It was re-investment of profit into the corporation. It grew exponentially because of the re-investment.

This sport will never be like Nascar/PERIOD.When was the last time you saw 1 Nascar race against no other cars/never,when was the last time Dale Earnheart,Jeff Gordon or Dale Jarrett say well I am not getting my own way so I am going to pack up my toys and go race somewhere else,never,when Nascar has a difference of opinion they all sit down together and work out the problem.In offshore racing we do not have a set of rules that are comporable from organization to organization and you have to many people with personal agendas to be making the rules and that can not agree with anyone else to prove that they are correct and everybody else is wrong that it further hurts the sport.
If the powers that be,being John Carbonell,Bob Bull,Kurt Burger and Paul Whittier can not see that all of the organizations should become one than they are as blind as the people that have never been able to see that for this sport.The only way it will ever become better and more recodnized as a professional sport is if we all join together and act like professionals wanting to race and not be a bunch of constant turmoil oil groups of people with fast boats that cannot agree with anyone but the people in there little click,or a bunch of people that do not really care about anything but there own personal agendas and more for the partys than the racing,once again it is not Nascar,or Bass fishing or even the Xgames but all of those things had one thing in common,one set of rules,one organization,and a professionally layed out program that people can follow and understand.We need to get it all together or do something different with our huge amounts of money that come out of our own pockets.

guys,one malfunction we all have here is only being able to comunicate with each other on a basically public forum,the only thing that should be public here is competitiveness,individual goals to acheive with and for racing,everybody complains about this or that,but remember,one its christmas time,and two,we don't have 20 cities with tracks or stadiums for us to compete at regularly,we don't have the busch series for the smaller cars and the other series for the bigger and faster cars,we do have a bunch of great people who sell us dearly trying to run things the best they can,trying to find different cities to help take some of the financial burden off us,and you all know thats difficult in this day and time,I'm a racer in offshore,I go where the boats go and somebody's hard work landed us a race,If I can't afford it or can't get the time off due to circumstances,then I don't get to race,But the one thing I can still count on is I know that someones trying real hard to straighten out anothers mess,and they worked even harder and found us a course to run on and that you guys will be there.If someone wants to set up a meeeting say In southcarolina or some where to discuss things and invite these organizations in and try to straighten things out during the silly season,now would be the time to straighten out and set goals for 06.

other than that all I can say is,scott,turn the damm boat and hold on,
and thanks to GMC for there three years of sponsorship and to budweiser for theres in key west,these people fullfilled there contracts completely as sponsors and help us out tremendously!I don't know about you guys,but I drive my GMC truck to the store for budweiser quite damm often,great sponsors!

guys up until about 10 years ago nascar was at a lower level than offshore, guys like childress were still working out of their garages.nascar is where it is not because of bill france or any other individual.its because a corporate sponsor,winston, saw the potential in it and marketed it correctly.nascar may look fancy on the outside but its still the same mentality you can find at any short track in the country on a Saturday night.the stadium theory does not hold water .the money thats brought in from the gate goes to the track owners who in turn pay nascar to bring a race to them.the sponsors do not care about 100,000 fans in the stands who see their name.its all about how many seconds of air time they get.it's all about having somthing people want to see.another example some one saw potential in a father and son arguing with each other while building motorcycles would make good tv.it only has the potential all together.these towns and sites make a ton of money off of the racers,orange beach had another weekend of their summer season where otherwise would have been dead.key west was basically sold out race week.

smyth,those cities paid for us to come,key west put there money on the table,that money comes directly from the hotels and restraunts and we should be able to count on them next year.

now what would be nice is to approach these venues and sell them to pay for their own TV produced show,let them get the coverage of the cities airing on TV,most of these sports I beleive got larger selling excitimenet and a great time together,letting the fans know they can book there excitement for next year instead of counting on us to book all the rooms,the cities have the advertising funds available,getting them to redirect the funds and add them to the event funds,getting the three organazations to unify but allow them to recognize there own while still recognizing the individuals who made the podiums together,and splitt the overall costs,and work together and make this a sport to be recognized!

yes they put up some money, but they had a full hotel for 10 days because of it.if a hotel has 100 rooms at 100 a night.thats 10 gs a night for 10 nights thats 100.000. how much did they actually put up?without the race they would not be sold out.they know it brings money into the town if it didn't they wouldn't do it.it's always been the racers who foot the bill for everything and bring their equipment to the show.

how about we choose you,your in jersy and from what I read on this board you have alot of true gentlemen who are quite the business men who reside there,what we need is to spend this time finding a production company that has a tremendous marketing department who can sell us some airtime,sell it to the cities during our scheduled events,sell it to the advertisers in the cities that schedule our events,no matter what series is running,they will all follow!