Thread: Sebring Feb
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Old 02-19-2008
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anashracing anashracing is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Jacksonville, FL
Age: 41
Posts: 11
Re: Sebring Feb

Sounds like everyone had a great weekend even with all of the turmoil amongst cars and logistics, etc... Unfortunatly I wasn't there to enjoy, as I was truckin' and wrenchin' for a double 3day school we had going at Moroso, which is a whole nother story in itself! Just like everything that comes out of my mouth, this is an OPINION only, and may not hold all of the facts. BUT, mechanics are in a very hard spot right now, (atleast from what I've seen in 2 1/2 years) we are EXTREMELY understaffed right now, with many of our mechanis either moving on too bigger race teams (congrats to those making the jump) or just getting out of the company all together because of not being treated right by the corporate side of this company that doesn't appreciate what it takes to run a respectable operation for our customers that spend well over our mechanics salary's just to come play with us. Obviously, just like our National kids, Skippy provides a stepping stone for mechanics that want to wrench at a professional level, so this is a high turn over rate position to begin with............. meaning staffing should be an ongoing process, with training going on around the clock(along with our normal tasks). Not to mention should not be getting hampered by background checks, drug tests, or other paperwork issues that somebody in CT that only works a 40hr week and makes atleast 4 times as much throws at the situation. Dont get me wrong I think a decent, SOBER person should be working on our race cars, but lets think about this for a min. you advertise a 24k year salary that doesn't have that great of a health car plan(us contractors have to fend for ourselves), and is likely to work you 80+ hour weeks , oh and three weeks in a row like our full time guys that were @ Sebring this past weekend have done, then your gonna get two types of people. Either bottom of the barrel type employees, or somebody with a true racing disease. Either of which is gonna be a short time employee that doesn't really give a fu*$ about their work ethic because they are on the way out anyways. This is in NO way directed at a specific mechanic, just the general opinion/feeling that I've been feeling since about the end of our midwestern series last year.

On top of our lack of staffing(I know the horse was dead long ago), how the hell do you fix cars without parts? From what I understand parts orders have been getting declined because of disagreements between our parts guy Sam and corporate up in CT. Disagreements on quantity being the main issue I suppose. The crash box issue came about this past weekend because a certain individual in CT thought that an order of 40 crash boxes at the beginning of the season was outragious. So now Sam has been stripped of his parts ordering responsibilities and has to jump through an extra hoop just bring us parts. Hopefully this doesn't cause too much more turmoil but I think its very important for ya'll(our investors/customers) to realize that cracked motor mounts were being re-welded just to keep cars running on track! What's up with that, everybody that actually participates in our weekends, wether it be instructor, customer, or mechanic knows that Sebring is THE ROUGHEST track we go to and with out a doubt breaks certain parts more often than others. Why are we not allowing the guys that do this every weekend to do their job and stock up certain parts for certain events? It should also be a very well known fact that Jan.-March is extremely busy for us with starting seasons, go kart shoot-out's, schools, and the 12 hour, staffing and parts logistics should have been catered too back in Dec. Instead alot of our guys were declined reasonable Vacation that month and forced to work Xmas and New years Holidays because we were already running low on mechanics at that point. I'm not sure how to end this other than, most of you have prolly heard it already and are use to the up and down cycle that seems to happen here.



If anyone wants to correct me/ question me feel free to email anashracing@hotmail.com keep in mind these ARE the opinions of a NON full time employee, that no longer deals with these issues on a daily basis.



P.S.- hope to see a good turn out for the 12 hour both racers and mechanics, I will be in the SPEED GT paddock working with Riley Racing Volvo if anyone wants to check out a prancing Moose!
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