[kdobson]

Thanks for the replies. While not responding (still dealing with paying out etc. from our rainout. Rainouts are headaches on a lot of fronts), I have been thinking through comments as I see them.

kb78 - to your point. It starts with the understanding that your ticket pays the racers' purse. This has to be clear to the fans. 9 times out of 10 what we take in from the front gate and pits gets paid back in purse to the teams and pay for our help. I think most tracks for regular shows are pretty close to this equation give or take far less than you might imagine. I've said before - we are in the food/drink business. The vast majority of the time our non-purse overhead gets paid from the concession end of the operation.

With that said, I don't think you are going to a track that BOTH pays the purse and gives you a rain check to use another day. Its an either/or. Either the purse got paid and you do not get a raincheck - or the purse didn't get paid and you (and the teams) have a rain check. At it's core, my thought is to not automatically pay the ENTIRE night's purse for features that don't get run and instead use the balance that wasn't paid to make a raincheck worth something. And to pay some purse even if the race hasn't reached the magical "preliminaries are over" stage and take a proportional amount off the value of your raincheck on account of you having sat and enjoyed racing for 2 hours.

This wouldn't happen often. But here's a scenario from my show last Friday. We had 5 classes of cars. Main class was a $2,500 to win Sprint show which was the third class of the night. We completed all heats, a midget feature, street stock feature and 11 laps (of 25 - not quite half way) of the Sprint feature when it rained. 305's and micro features were never run. Because we got 11 laps into the main event, I just used the old rule and paid the purse to everyone and no rainchecks were issued.

But - as that sprint feature was getting close and the rain was getting even closer - I was thinking about what would happen if it rained right before the sprint feature (main event) or even 2 or 3 laps into it. In that scenario - under the existing rule the night is complete. I pay all of the purse to the racers and the fans don't get a raincheck - even though they never saw any of the main event. That just doesn't seem entirely fair to the fans. They never saw the main thing they came to see - and in theory the Sprint teams didn't have the expense of running the feature.

I was thinking at the time of math like this. The entire night's purse was roughly 20k. I paid around 4k for the midget feature and 1,500 for the street stocks. So I still have roughly 3/4 of the event purse left to pay for features that won't be run ($15,000). What if I proportionately paid out about half of that or $7500 to the remaining 3 classes 6k to sprints, 1k to my 10 305's, and 1,500 to the 20 micros. And then made the rainchecks for the grandstands worth around $7-8 bucks and the pit pass raincheck worth about $12. I would have paid out about 2/3 of the night's purse and the rainchecks would be worth about 1/3 of the amount paid for them. In my mind the two sides of the equation (racers and fans) are meeting closer to the middle and nobody is single handedly taking it on the chin. Financially for the track it's all the same either way. I just seemed a little more fair than taking all of the fans money without having seen the main event. Fortunately the rain held off long enough to give them what I felt like was enough of the main event to justify the outcome of the "old rule".