Ok, our local chapter of the buccaneer region (savannah) is having trouble finding a chair. Who here is a chairman in their Auto-X series? Is it a pain in the Arss or what. I was asked to be the chair, but for some reason i keep beating around the bush. then again we do need sites and 2 of our 3 sites got taken from us during last season. we have a highschool lot we used twice and Roebling road we use 3 times.

nice shedule huh..
http://ceautocross.tripod.com/schedule.html

 

I've done that job and many others for the local regions. This kind of thing can be real rewarding and it can be a real drain. You need to honestly review how much time you can dedicate to it and balance it with the amount of help you might get from others. Is it a good group who work together or will you be the lone wolf doing it by himself? Needing to find and recruit more lot locations is not much fun and puts you behind the 8-ball to start. I have generally liked most of the regional work I've done but you need to be honest with all aspects. Your own personal organizational skills will have a lot to do with yur success as well.

 

Ditto what Lee said. I'd been the autocross chair for our program for the last three years. The first 1.5 years were fun, but the second half of the last second year started to drain on me. I tried to pull out for the third year, but nobody stepped up to do it. Now someone has stepped up, and I think things will go smoothly.

Being an event chair is really what you make of it. The guy that did it before me did enough to keep the program alive, but didn't put in any kind of continued improvemen. I took on the job because I wanted to make improvements. After every event I'd talk with people to see how we, as a club, did. If changes were necessary, I had an autocross committee to run ideas through.

Fortunately, for event days, I had a really strong crew that didn't need any real direction. They were reliable and dedicated. It was the between event things that wore me out. The planning, meetings, conversations with sites, losing of sites (!), not quite enough staff, K&K, and then the annoying competitors.

It was the uncooperative competitors that really surprised me. Complaining about working, not doing quick worker change overs (sometimes 10-20 minutes!), not actually watching cars while working, complaining about a course because it didn't fit them specifically, not listening to the driver's meetings, doing stupid stuff like donuts in the gravel, etc. I suppose that's typical of any autocross, though, and in reality it's only a few bad seeds. But it all wears on the chair because it's their responsibility.

It may seem like I'm not recommending that you do it. There's just a lot to the job. So, as Lee said, you need to evaluate your personal life, current stress levels, and the crew that will be helping you to determine if it's something you want to take on.

If my paying job were a little less stressful, like when I started as the chair, I'd probably do it again. But the combined stress of my job, plus the autocross chair became to much.

 

The biggest thing is to make sure you have people to help you out. If you take on the position of chair, and there is no committee to help with the various tasks, you will burn out very, very quickly. I would be very leery of stepping into the role, however, if no one else if thinking about it. To me, that's saying there there are plenty of people who want to autocross, but no one wants to do the work to make sure there are autocrosses.

Karen
former NASA-Va autox chair, burned out