The latest club meeting of the Ocala R/C Car Club was held at the race site on October 18, 2001. Attendees included Tom, Melanie, Tommy & Danny Hitchcock, Carlton, Davy and Justin Tipton, Fletcher Grosz, Christian Ginter, Mason McCombs, Bill & Bonita Hamilton and Jonathan Hicks. The next club meeting is scheduled for November 15^th at 7:30 PM at A2Z Race Park. Plan to attend!

OLD BUSINESS:

The Race for America held on September 29^th was a huge success. 100 % of the money taken in on this race day was earmarked for the September 11^th Fund and take in the money we did! The combined total from race registration, concessions, raffle ticket sales for donated items from RCI Laser (Rob Reinhardt), Leopards Discount Warehouse, Safari Audio, Silver Springs Attractions, Jack’s Hobbies and BJ Trophies, 50/50 ticket sales and the stupendous bake sale was $1300! It was a night to remember that was the brainchild of Tom Evans and the result of tons of hard work from Melanie Hitchcock, Susan Danvers, Liz Daly, Max (yeah, right) Sternemann and June & Carlton Tipton.

The pit rental format has been postponed, by popular demand, until the first of the year. Racers are still allowed to set up permanent pits, just check with Tom Hitchcock for an appropriate location.

The upgrade of the audio system is still being contemplated. A couple of professional bids were submitted, but deemed to be outside our budget! Jonathan Hicks brought a show-n-tell product that just might solve our problems in this area, a wireless speaker. For approximately $45 he purchased an Advent wireless speaker and transmitter. Only 1 transmitter is needed and our test proved that the speaker was well within range when set up in any of the pits!

The November and December charities will cap at $750 this year. Interfaith food bank is the chosen charity for November. Community with a Heart seems to be the likely candidate for the December charity, but we may decide to spread the donation to numerous charities. Carlton Tipton is going to look into our different available options.

The ORCCC will switch to the "winter" schedule effective Saturday, November 3^rd. This schedule has registration beginning at 12 noon, with the races starting at 1:00 P.M. We are hoping this slightly delayed schedule will allow plenty of time for our racers that have to work on Saturday mornings.

NEW BUSINESS:

If you’ve got a smack-daddy, groovy idea for a race and/or event that will make us all proud to be part of the ORCCC, we’d love to hear it. BUT, we would be more excited to see you, the creator, spearhead the idea and make it happen! The board needs some regeneration time, folks. We’ve worked steadily since the grand opening one year ago to make this club and track what it is today. We’re looking to you the racers and members to keep things going strong while we take a short sabbatical from anything other than weekly racing.

In this same vein, the board wants to make a blanket announcement that when you do come to one of us with an idea, we may not be as prompt as you would like for us to be in responding to your comments. With the break-neck pace that we lead these days, you are lucky the board members can find the track each Saturday! Written direction might be a possible form of communication that will prove more successful than a comment in passing during a busy race! Bear with us, we are only human!

Leopards Discount Warehouse has expressed an interest in advertising at the track and on the website. In light of the massive amount of goods they donated during the Race for America, this should not pose a problem.

TRACK CHANGE TIME IS COMING… We will be taking submissions for a new track layout effective November 1^st. Keeping with our every 6-month rotation schedule, January will be the next change date. Submit your idea in writing to a board member as soon as you can!

A workday is scheduled for Sunday, November 4^th at noon. The areas of interest for the crew will be the area behind concessions and the water holding tank. This area will be straightened and organized. The available pipes and tools will be stored for easy access and inventory. Come on guys, the hard stuff has already been done; why not help us with our finishing touches!

We are officially taking offers for our old transponder system. A couple of clubs expressed an interest about a month ago and we will contact them to see if they are still interested. The system contains 20 transponders and charging rack, decoder box, 2 pickup loop interface boxes and carrying case. Possible options (we haven’t quite decided yet!) might include race software and the laptop. Interested parties contact us pronto!

We’ve got an exciting change to the November 17^th race day! Instead of giving $10 in race bucks to the randomly selected racers name like we normally do, we are offering the lucky winner a Turkey in honor of Thanksgiving! Come and join us and see if you can win!

A note from the director of the Region 4 Off-Road series was discussed at the meeting. It seems that Naples’ Region Race date in December has been UN-approved by the county the park is located in (after previously being approved). They wanted to "steal" our January state series race day and re-schedule our race for February. We unanimously voted to change our race date. It seems the offered February date might be too close to the Winterchamps race date, but we’ll work something out. Another tidbit of interest was the question of whether we would be interested in hosting a Nitro Regional race. I couldn’t write Y-E-S fast enough. I contacted the director immediately after the meeting to get the lowdown on this exciting chance. We’ll keep you posted on both races!

New members and renewals over the last month include: Danny Mayer, Darrell and Beverly Vance, Earl Bersamin, Tony Rodriguez and Alex Rodriguez. Welcome aboard and welcome back folks, we look forward to seeing you at the races.