SCCA Legacy Stories
By Jim Weidenbaum | SCCA Foundation Board of Directors
Like most members, I joined SCCA for the cars, but early on I was hooked by the friendly and often hilarious story-telling – I mean how else would you find out who set the fastest naked night lap time at Road Atlanta? If memory serves me well, the alleged driver went on to win a Trans-Am championship. So many SCCA stories from special individuals are out there, but generally not captured in any formal way. The SCCA Foundation has launched SCCA Legacy Stories – a long-term project to capture these stories.
The thing about a club, our Club, is the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – but without the individual parts the whole would not be what it is today. And sometimes the unfortunate truth is that the individual contributions, moments, and stories get forgotten in the shadow of the larger Club. We need to capture as many first-hand accounts of how we got to where we are today as a Club.
Just as today’s children may struggle to imagine a world without the Internet or smart phones, it is hard to imagine SCCA without Spec Miata, Street Prepared, RallyCross, or Track Night in America. It goes deeper than the creation of racing types or classes – it is how have timing & scoring, corner marshalling, race tech, and stewarding evolved? There are individuals in our club who know the background stories behind SCCA innovations, traditions, and hijinks. To preserve this history requires gathering multiple stories and points of view.
The SCCA Foundation wants to capture the great stories of the individuals that comprise our Club and these unique backstories. Working with the SCCA Archives team at the IMRRC, we want to collect stories and share them in a way that future readers and viewers can understand and appreciate the relevance years and decades from now. While the SCCA Hall of Fame memorializes the accomplishments of outstanding individuals, this Legacy Stories program is intended to capture other meaningful histories and stories from a broader representation of our Club.
So, how to begin this endeavor? I think many of us have stared at a bunch of boxes of parts knowing we had to start somewhere to make a racecar out of them. So, here’s how we’re going to begin our assembly:
On the SCCA Foundation website is a legacy story submission form where you will be asked to outline your story. We’ll ask you categorize it by SCCA program, class, car, position, or other. From these submissions, we will select some representative ones and follow-up with an e-mail, phone call, or web-interview depending on the person’s comfort with technology. For a few high-profile areas we will move from capturing iPhone or Zoom videos to professional production. We expect most of these to be between five and fifteen minutes long if recorded in an audio or video format.
Depending on the topic, we will work with the IMRRC for support material and/or look to those being interviewed to share any photos, articles or notes they may have. We are more interested in the why things happened than capturing the what, for example, why was there interest in developing Spec Renault versus details on development of specific rules sets.
While we want to see what our members suggest, our first Legacy Story will be on SCCA Race Registrars. For many new racers to SCCA the first person they saw on a race weekend was the registrar. Race registrars, generally women, were super organizers, problem-solvers, ombudsmen, ambassadors, and vice principals when people stepped out of line – both literally and figuratively. Before the days of Motorsports Reg, it was mailing in checks with sufficient time to arrive before race day, then it was taking registrations to the Race Director and coordinating with T&S, etc. These jobs require countless hours of work … we want to hear their stories, from them or their literal or acting families for those whom we have already lost.
The mission of SCCA Legacy Stories is to preserve and share the history of our Club in order to build connection, insight, and understanding of SCCA’s beginnings, development, challenges and solutions for the benefit of future generations. Do you have a story to share?