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.