The absence of a shop local to the Wycombe club really hurts us in my opinion. Apex do their best to promote WRCC and the classes we race, but most of the time our customers live too far away to make a weekly trip up to Wycombe for racing viable.
When Wycombe Models was open, even though the bloke running it had the worlds worst customer service and generally showed the hobby in a bad light, what he did do was sell loads of Mardave kits and direct people to where they could race them. We once had 49 drivers for a Mardave club night - we get 15 now.
The initial buzz around micros has gone now and I am finding it difficult to sustain the class at WRCC. In 18 months we have gone from getting 25 regulars, to fewer than 10 on most nights.
A few people have said they gave up micros because they couldn't be arsed with the hassle of performing a LWB conversion to a shark. Others have said that they have just found something they find more interesting to do (not everyone finds a hobby and sticks with it for 10 years like me!). I have no idea why the other 80% stopped coming!
With the attendance figures thing, in the past I have found that 10-15 drivers is the magic threshold. Once you get about 15 regulars it snowballs and the popularity increases. If it's single figures then it struggles to promote itself and the numbers die right down. We had just 4 at WRCC a couple of months ago. We get 8-10 now since I've been back racing, but I'm struggling to see where the next 5 are going to come from...
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