WHRRI Sticky Tires News Letter – December 2023

I have another good news/ bad news contribution this month. Jerry Shiloff, our long time Chief Steward, passed away recently. Jerry, along with his wife Mary was involved with WHRRI for over 50 years. His contribution to the Club is hard to measure, but his absence will be felt for a long time.

A lot has been going on since we finished our racing season. The Board hired Steve Toth to be our facility manager. We look forward to his contributions to the smooth running of our club. He has big shoes to fill with Jerry Pintar’s passing, but he has already hit the ground running.

The paddock is being repaved! The old pavement was removed and a “leveling course” has been put down. The top layer will be put down first thing in the spring. If you get a chance, check out the mountains of millings in the trailer parking area. As always, but especially with the fresh asphalt, jacking a car up on the pavement is forbidden. The prohibition will be strictly enforced next season!

We also completed an extended and expanded gravel trap in turn two. We can hope that cars on top of the tires and the fence in the runoff area will be a thing of the past. Mike from our lawn service took care of the project quickly and did a great job. They also did a really nice job cleaning up the “gulch”.

We had a good time at the Awards Banquet. At the Banquet, we celebrate our successes and pay our recurring debt of gratitude to the volunteers that make WHRRI so successful. It is our chance to pay tribute to the hard work that goes into being a successful racer and to acknowledge a renewed interest in racing as evidenced by the success of some of our “rookies”. The kitchen staff led by John and Kathy prepared an excellent meal and did a valiant job trying to feed our ravenous horde!

We have six cars signed up for Autorama. It will be held March 1, 2 and 3, 2024 at Cobo. I will post sign-up sheets on the Forum starting in January. We always have a good time meeting people, seeing many truly amazing works of automotive art and coming home with trophies.

Once again, I will cut and paste part of what I wrote last month. WHRRI’s continued success depends more than you think on our participation in our parent club:

I’ll spare everyone my rant about volunteering in a virtually all volunteer club. We all know what needs to be done. I will, though, continue to extol the virtues of being active at the OCSC with a reminder that we are already members of OCSC and that we owe the club our loyalty and participation. As is the case with WHRRI, it seems that 95 percent of the work gets done by 5 percent of the members. Despite there being more than 130 WHRRI members, I don’t think I see more than 10 of us at the OCSC general membership meeting. We can do better. The food is good and the beer is cold. Come to a meeting and find out what is going on.

There will not be a general membership meeting in December. The bylaws specify 11 meetings per year, so we have a month off. I wish everyone a happy holiday season.

Brian Murphy