MMC Road Rally

Today was the Sort of Annual MMC Road Rally and Donna and I WON!

We didn’t run away from the field by any means, it was a very nar­row vic­tory over the sec­ond place team. But because there were only two cars com­pet­ing, the worse we could have fin­ished was sec­ond, even if we took twice as long as pre­dicted in time, mileage or both to run the course. There were sup­posed to be 4 cars, but ill­nesses to entrants and/or fam­ily mem­bers cut the field in half. It is kind of sad that with all the work put into cre­at­ing one of these things, thanks John & Jackie, that only 4 peo­ple even signed up to do the rally.

You can’t truly blame apa­thy for the low turn out, because if you take the folks that were sup­posed to run the rally it accounts for almost a quar­ter of the Club. Add in the folks who cre­ated the event and you are almost up to a third of the membership.

The prob­lem is the size of the Club and so far we haven’t found a solu­tion to grow­ing the mem­ber­ship. I can’t tell you how to add mem­bers, but I can tell you why the Club rolls are shrink­ing. First off, Mazda doesn’t sup­port a national Club any­more. When they did, every buyer of a new Miata received a glossy mag­a­zine that had a back page list­ing all the regional clubs that some­one could join. Even if they were still doing that, the pool of pos­si­ble club mem­bers would be shrink­ing because the sales of Miatas is falling off. In the US, annual sales have gone from nearly 36,000 in 1990 to a low of around 6,300 in 2010. Because the Miata is such a reli­able car, used car sales eas­ily out­pace new, and those buy­ers never find out about the exis­tence of a local Club unless they are look­ing. Also, now a days life has sped up to the point peo­ple don’t have the time to ded­i­cate to Club mem­ber­ships of any kind.

Pretty soon our lit­tle club is going to reach crit­i­cal mass and dis­ap­pear in a puff of exhaust smoke just due to nat­ural attri­tion. So if any one out there has any ideas how to get folks to join a club, any club, sug­ges­tions are welcome.