It is with much relief that, in my opinion, I didn’t royally mess up anything during my first year as Suncoast PCA President. When outgoing President, Page Obenshain, introduced me as the incoming President at the 2013 Gala, my only words at the podium were “I hope I don’t screw anything up!” I worked at maintaining what had already been built and creating an environment where the competent directors we have on the board would have the tools to do their jobs easily.
You may have noticed that the new board is mostly the ‘old’ board as we are welcoming back all of our 2014 board of directors with only a couple of tweaks. As published earlier, Dave Herndon is moving from the Co-Chair of 48 Hours at Sebring to the esteemed Zone 12 Representative position; Grant Painter is moving from Chief Track Instructor to Co-Chair of 48 Hours of Sebring and Amy Riches replaced Grant as CTI in November. Working with the same group of leaders will enable us to accomplish much this year as most of the groundwork has been laid.
What great leadership we have in the Suncoast Region! We have much to be proud about looking back at 2014. Our membership has seen a steady increase in growth throughout the year. We had another successful 48 Hours at Sebring, the largest Porsche-only racing event in the world – in fact, it is the largest single marquee automobile racing event in the world! In our 21st year, we had over 450 participating Porsches and a successful event in spite of heavy rain. We discovered new venues as our Date Your Porsche Night membership socials continued to be a big success and selling out numerous months. We enjoyed many fabulous events thanks to our three dealerships, Bert Smith Porsche, Motorsports by Reeves, and Suncoast Motorsports – we can’t thank them enough for the support they give us. We had a successful AutoCross program with some months selling out. Our Driver’s Education program went through some changes and had a great year with sold out months for DE, too. We raised $50,000 for All Children’s Hospital at the Patrick Long Karting 4 Kids event and $83,235 in total for charities – all of which came from charitable efforts and not from our treasury. Once again the bi-annual trek to the Collier Museum (now Revs Institute) sold out as the museum continues to up their program. The 8th Annual Sunrise to Sunset Rally in conjunction with the Citrus Region and Space Coast Region was a huge success with the awards and dinner being held at the Beach Club at the Ritz Carlton in Sarasota. Mike Kwasin continued to delight us by hosting us for our Mid-Summer BBQ and the new Wine Tasting Charitable Event for the benefit of Ready for Life, our newest charity. We had many more wonderful events, too numerous to mention in a short article, and we appreciate and are in awe of the great leadership we have in our Region.
We are looking forward to many wonderful Porsche events in 2015 and the board of directors have been hard at work planning. We are holding a planning meeting early in January to continue refining what is already planned and work on exploring and developing new ideas. We already have events planned through December 2015 and will continue to work on filling in the calendar.
We hope you love your Porsche Club as much as we do and know that we are planning on seeing you at many of our upcoming events and programs. As Christian always says, Keep the shiny side up! Happy New Year!