Originally Posted by grippgoat

My local carpet club is a ROAR club. As I understand it, ROAR offers us: 1) rules, 2) approvals for motors, ESCs, batteries, bodies, 3) insurance, 4) worlds.

1) Rules (class specs) don't seem like a difficult thing to replace. They've been pretty much stable since I started racing in 2009. VTA, USGT, and USF1 have showed that ROAR isn't the only one capable of defining a successful rules set that racers will get behind.

Yes, we have rule sets for some classes that aren't strictly ROAR copy. But, underneath is the fundamental set of parameters in the ROAR rulebook. We'd stick with those.

2) Approvals. This might be the sticky one. Even non-ROAR rules packages have a tendency to refer to ROAR when it comes to approvals. There are also business implications for many companies, because approvals drive purchasing, which drives event sponsorship, which drives the health of the industry and the hobby. This is where the money is, and thus where the stakes are highest. I have no idea how difficult it would be for another organization to replace ROAR in this capacity, but given events of the last few years (D3.5 fiasco, Orca ban, blinky mode software...), the bar wouldn't seem to be unapproachably high.

Without an ongoing ROAR compliance regimen (motors, batteries, bodies) we would probably piggyback on some other organization's efforts: BRCA for instance. Motors and ESC's would be tough. I think we'd pretty quickly come around to the same model as USVTA and adopt a single motor for our 17.5 spec classes. ESC's? Again, we'd either have to open back up or we'd have to go with the ETS model and adopt a single product. I really can't imagine going back to pre-blinky speeds for Stock. I'm sure we'd go single vendor.

3) Insurance. What does it actually take to get a policy to replace ROAR's? I'm sure it's not rocket science, but just a matter of making numbers work in terms of policy cost versus club / member count and membership price.

For our temp track program, ROAR offers the best venue insurance by far (I've given it a good shop-around.) In its absence, we could find our own insurance, but the costs would be passed on to our racers in higher entry fees roughly to the tune of $5 additional per night per racer. The club and individual membership covers our 20+ night season far more affordably. For everyone. And this does not include the much greater paperwork burden of managing an insurance program in-house. Some lucky volunteer would get to slog through that one throughout the year.

4) Worlds. There aren't very many racers from any given club that will qualify for worlds and go. Our club wouldn't fall apart if no-one went to worlds. But having a member go to worlds (or nats, or IIC, etc) lets the rest of the club succeed vicariously to a certain degree, and it energizes people, so it's not completely irrelevant. Obviously club racing doesn't qualify you for worlds, but it's clubs that bid to host nats. What if literally no-one submitted bids to host on-road Nationals, so the races simply didn't happen? Would that force IFMAR to qualify people differently?

I can't forecast the fate of IFMAR if ROAR were to fold up. Behind the curtain, I'm sure ROAR would be sorely missed. In any event, there would be no governing body to offer up a credible "national championship" title. BS on those who say it doesn't mean anything. Everyone knows what national champion means. At every nationals I've attended, the titles have been fiercely contested. If they don't mean anything, you couldn't tell it on the track.