Race Date Changes Explained

[Wendy]

Dear Racers and Participants,

As your Admin Team, it is important to us that we keep you all aware
of what continues to go on behind-the-scenes with the race and our
preparations for it as they affect you. That said, we're continuing to
work on finding a good time slot in the year to run the Escape From
Berkeley race.

Our most recent attempt to hold the race in the fall, collides with
Burning Man and how it consumes racers/participant's time in this
area, in particular. The previously attempted 'early summer time'
dates competed with the same DIY building crowd for Maker Faire and
Fire Arts Festival. As you know, our race requires a major investment
in building time and attention, and we need to find a spot in the
yearly Bay Area building cycle where this event can grow into an
idiom. Also, it needs to work with university teams which need the
race later in the academic calendar, so the school year can be used to
build their vehicles.

Therefore, our current schedule of early October for the race is not
finding this 'sweet spot' of scheduling. In fact, as those dates
approach, we've had a good deal of difficulty getting the race to work
with the schedules of you, our interested racers and participants.

Thus, we've been faced with the choice of continuing forward with a
small racer pool, or moving the race dates to something more
conforming with what you want. We think we should do the latter. The
negatives of another reschedule seem smaller than the positives of
actually running the race in a manner which fulfills its potential.

To be clear, we are interested in having a quality race with more than
just a few participants and this decision is based on our dedication
to the success of the event and to you, our racers and participants.

Thus, we are now proposing to move the race forward to Spring, and
position it as the first event after the winter rest. This is when we
used to run the Power Tool Drag Races, and we found this 'first big
thing after the winter' slot produced lots of excitement and
engagement. April-May time also works well with many school schedules,
which is growing into an important group that wants to run in this.

So we have come to the conclusion: “Why fight it when all signs point
to a change-of-date?”

That said, we propose the 2nd annual Escape From Berkeley race for the
dates of April 24th-27th, 2010 (just after Earth Day, which should
provide some good fodder for the race!).

Otherwise, things are great and progressing well on many fronts.

Thanks again for being with us for this unusual adventure!

Vroom,
Jess and the rest of the Escape From Berkeley Gear Heads