Maximize your experience with Max Track Time

Charles Streicher - Operations Manager for Max Track Time

Max Track Time began as a private testing program for two car racing team, Stratus Racing, in 2020. Our focus was to host two-day tests on weekends or as close to weekends as possible, so to make it convenient for our drivers with full-time careers outside of racing. Despite starting as private tests, the demand to attend quickly grew, and from there, Max Track Time was born.

Contact: Charles Streicher at info@maxtracktime.com | 847-826-2706 | Visit Online!

          

• Tell us about how you got started with Max Track Time, and how the program has evolved. What are some changes you’ve made.
• What’s the difference between a “Test Day” and a “Track Day”?
• Does Max Track Time have a “home track” or “home base”
• How do you find, and where do you register for Max Track Time events?
• What is the average session length? What is the average weekend/day cost? 
• What other services does Max Track Time offer that people might not be aware of? What are some changes for the next few upcoming seasons you’d like to share?

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BrakeFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder, how did they get that job? Or become that person.

The road to success is paved by all of us. Because everyone has a story.

Crew Chief Eric: Their mission is in their name. To provide the maximum amount of high quality track time for their participants. Events are open exclusively to experienced racing and track day drivers. This allows them to remove run groups to allow their entrants to manage their own schedules to best service their needs.

Tonight, we’re joined by Charlie Stryker, Operations Manager for MaxTrackTime, to explore the idea of how you can maximize your entire track day experience with them without compromises. So welcome to Break Fix, Charlie.

Charlie Streicher: Hey Eric, thanks for [00:01:00] having me. I appreciate you guys bringing me on.

Crew Chief Eric: So like all good break fix stories, everybody has a superhero origin.

So let’s talk about Charlie the petrol head before we get into what is max track time all about. Did you get into cars as a kid? Did you come from a racing family? Did you come into it later in life?

Charlie Streicher: I got in maybe a little later than most kids did, but You know, earlier than a lot of folks who discovered it later in life in fifth grade, I saw a movie called American Graffiti.

My dad was a big fan of old movies. So, you know, he always had us watch those. And there was a drag race in that between, it was Bob Falfa’s 55 Chevy and Milner’s 32 Deuce Coupe. I just thought that those things were the coolest thing in the world. And all I wanted in fifth grade was to have a yellow Deuce Coupe, just like Milner’s, you know, a little unrealistic, both for the age.

And, you know, I don’t think you’re going to see a teenager driving around in a classic car like that. You know, when I was old enough to drive, I did end up buying myself a Mustang. I wanted to be just like those cars in that movie. So I chopped all the exhaust off, made it loud as hell. It was, my mom [00:02:00] hated it.

Everyone else around town thought it was the most annoying thing in the world, but man, I thought I was cool. You know, after college finally had a little bit of cash. And so I wanted to start doing track days and whatnot. And so I did it in that Mustang. That car was probably the worst car to do track days in.

You know, you’d kind of drive up the corner, hop out, lift the car up, turn it, and then go the next corner. Taught me the fundamentals enough, you know, I was able to then kind of leverage that into then going to the Skippy schools, doing Skip Barber and racing and that, you know, from there, racing just kind of took off.

And that’s what I’ve kind of been doing since then.

Crew Chief Eric: So if you had to buy a track car today, new, old, or in the future, what would you buy?

Charlie Streicher: You know, I had the opportunity to drive a Radical SR3 a while back. Yeah, I just think that they’re great value. I think the NPO 1 honestly as well is pretty good value when looking at a track car for dollar per mile and just the pace per dollar.

You know, I think the NPO 1 is an extremely underrated car. Well, our Thunder Hill car, you know, we’ve got that [00:03:00] built with a, uh, 2. 5 liter putting out 250 horsepower. And at Audubon country club on slicks, we were doing. F3 car pays, you know, and granted an Audubon country club, not the fastest track for an F3 car, but the amount of aerodynamic ability that that car has built into it is phenomenal.

You know, like, the, the tobacco and 1, the guy who builds them, his name is Ben Cooper. He used to be a wind tunnel guy for Williams. F1, you know, he really took a car that was like, very built. I think for cost efficiency. At first when it came out and he’s taken it and turned it into a really, really proper race car.

So, uh, yeah, I think if I, if I had to get a track day car, it’d be an NPO one.

Crew Chief Eric: So you mentioned that you’re driving the NPO one for a WRL team and you started out with a Mustang. So when you go to your local HPD event, what are you tooling around in these days?

Charlie Streicher: So usually when I go to HPDs, I just instruct.

I do some coaching with, like, the NASA region locally here and, uh, NASA Great Lakes. I’ll go up and coach every once in a while. I’ll go home, see my buddies. I [00:04:00] have a 1994 Miata with, uh, like 220, 000 miles on it. And to be honest, I’m kind of afraid of that thing. It’s kind of a rusty piece of junk. You know, last time I took it out to VR and I’m going through turn 10 and, you know, that car is so down on power.

Now you can take turn 10, just about flat. And I’m thinking, what if something broke right now, that would be absolutely catastrophic. So most of the time I just go there and coach, cause I love coaching. I worked at extreme experience for five years, you know, working right seat with hundreds and hundreds of people.

And I just, I just loved sharing that experience with folks.

Crew Chief Eric: Is there anything on the street these days that gets your attention?

Charlie Streicher: When I was a kid, I was such a muscle car fan. I loved muscle cars. You know, nowadays I drive a 2015 Camry. I’m very boring. If I had to have kind of a cool cruiser car, I love the 82 Ferrari through a GTS, you know, the Magnum PI car.

You know, there’s just something about target top old red Ferrari that just. You know, it’s just cool[00:05:00]

Crew Chief Eric: speaking my language. All right, so how did that evolve into max track time?

Charlie Streicher: Yeah, so max track time started as a private testing operation for our team where we would just rent tracks and do about six weekends or six, you know, two day tests every year. Me and a couple of folks that I did Skippy with wound up racing the Sebeco NPO1.

That’s a car that both needed development on the performance side for the car, but then also we wanted development for us as drivers. Two cars and eight drivers between them. A track day just won’t cut it for getting that kind of practice and getting that development. Or, you know, God forbid you need to try out a change on a car, be it aero change, setup swaps, new components, what have you.

And so we did a lot of private testing, you know, we really focused on getting convenient dates for our drivers, whether that be weekends or Thursday, Fridays or Monday, Tuesdays, because a lot of our guys work, you know, there’s only a couple of our people who are professional in the racing industry and had that kind of [00:06:00] freedom to come and test during the week.

And so we tried to make it as convenient for everybody as possible. From there, we had a tested barber a couple years ago. We just extended the invite to a bunch of other teams that were racing with us to see if anybody else wanted to. And, uh, sure enough, every single team we invited showed up. And so it kind of started to just snowball there where we thought, okay, people see the value in coming out and testing and, and having this open track environment.

Yeah. So we thought, okay, why don’t we just standardize this and market it out to anybody who might be like us, who is interested in doing this kind of testing. We decided that, you know, okay, we’ve got something that people want to do. Let’s make it into a business. And so from there we made Max track time.

It’s not so much a track day company in the chin or like that sense. It’s more of an alternative to private testing. We open up these two day events. They’re open track, open passing from green to checker for up to 25 cars to come out and just run. If for those folks like us who really can’t make the track day format [00:07:00] work, it’s a great alternative to having to go and rent a track and get your own insurance and do all of the kind of the legwork to get that all sorted.

Crew Chief Eric: So when did you guys establish max track time? How long have you been doing this?

Charlie Streicher: At this point, Max Tractime has only done two events. We had one at Thunder Hill, and then we had one at Audubon Country Club, and we’ve added in catering and beverage service and such, because not every team has that arm where they have someone providing hospitality.

You know, at the events that we hosted before, some folks would end up disappearing during lunch to go run out to, you know, whatever subway or whatever they could find. So we thought, okay. We can plus up this experience a little bit and, uh, our big rollout’s going to be next year here where we have 14 events, we’ve got six, two day events, and then we’ve got a bunch of Thursday test days before WRL events at the various tracks that they go to.

Crew Chief Eric: So you guys are the newest. Let’s call it track day organization on the scene. So that’s exciting because they don’t just pop up overnight anymore. I mean, I hate to say the market is pretty saturated. There’s different [00:08:00] organizations that have been around doing this for decades now and others that come and gone.

So it’s cool to see something different. And obviously max track time is doing just that. So when you run an event, it’s pretty cool. Kind of compare and contrast your experience with, let’s say other HPD organizations and how you’re running it. Are there flaggers? How does coming on and off the track work?

There are no run groups, so it’s just an open day. But, you know, we’re all sort of used to the flag talk and all these kinds of things. So what’s the day like when it kicks off at a max track time event? What’s that drivers meeting like?

Charlie Streicher: You know, generally it’s going to be the rundown of the facility, where things are going to be, where our catered lunches are going to be coordinated, how to get in and out of pit lane, what the flags are, obviously, and where the flag positions are.

You know, I like to include a lot of maps and graphics and stuff in my PowerPoints that I give so that people know where to look and what to look for. Trying to get people as acclimated to the facility and the on track attitude before they get out there. I typically try to make the driver’s meeting restricted to things that people [00:09:00] need to know and that they’ll actually want to know.

And not so much all the ancillary stuff that might be focused on a, a beginner.

Crew Chief Eric: Because the track is open and there’s no run groups and things like that, you still got to give the workers, the volunteers, the flaggers a break. So do you guys cut up the day in any way, or is it, we’re going to run the morning session for four hours, there’ll be an hour break.

And then, you know, we’ll do an afternoon or how does it all lay out?

Charlie Streicher: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. Yeah, we do the four hours with one hour lunch break and then another four hours there, you know, a lot of teams when they test, they’re not going to go all day long. And so, you know, they’ll give on track, they’ll come off track and they’ll come on track again, you know, just as they’re working on stuff.

So we actually open up our lunch 30 minutes before that breaking and 30 minutes after. So that way teams can kind of trickle in and feed themselves without having a whole bum rush on the lunch service there as well. It’s not uncommon for us also, being that this is effectively like a private test for us to have those rental car laps available to those people who want to utilize those.

These events are open [00:10:00] to folks who should have a pretty good understanding of what they’re doing. So, you know, in many ways, it’s a lot more lax than say, like, uh, a track day where you’ve got folks bringing their street cars out to come and run and do whatever.

Crew Chief Eric: Absolutely. And so with that, the on track etiquette, like you said, is like a race weekend.

So therefore it’s open passing. That’s the expectation.

Charlie Streicher: Absolutely. With the caveat that, you know, there’s 25 cars out on track and everyone’s got a different goal. Someone might be in there. Learning a track for the first time might be a newer driver who, you know, is licensed, but maybe not familiar with the track or getting more familiar with the car.

And then you’ve got someone else out there laying down quali labs, you know, but that’s where that 25 car limit comes in. At the expense that people are paying to be at these, we generally trust that the prep shops are going to prep their cars appropriately. And so we don’t have our whole internal tech team, you know, we’ll do the visual inspection, right?

You know, if someone’s running around on track who maybe shouldn’t be, then that would be an appropriate time for us to go and talk to them. But you know, we’re not going to go through your car and make sure that it’s prepped and ready to [00:11:00] go full flaggers. It’s going to be like a race weekend effectively as far as safety on track going to be a flagger in every corner.

There’s going to be a guy working pit lane releasing cars in and out overall. A lot of folks use these test days as opportunities to prep for race weekends. And so we want to keep the pit lane open, so we’re not going to hold people in pit lane. You can enter and exit pits as you wish. You can fuel in pit lane.

You can set up your crew in pit lane, driver changes, whatever you got to do. As far as the rules and the structure, it’s a race weekend because God knows when testing, especially if you’re a team that’s going to run an IMSA or SRO or something like that, you know, part of the value of testing is preparing your crew.

You can’t much do a practice driver change if you’re doing it in the paddock.

Crew Chief Eric: So are there any groups out there that are doing, let’s say, exercises or other types of strategic maneuvers? They

Charlie Streicher: can coordinate that between themselves. They want to do that, that’s all fine by me, as long as they’re not going to impinge on anybody else’s ability to test.

Because even though it’s like a race weekend, we’re not racing. You know, you don’t want to be bombing people in the corners, testing’s [00:12:00] about. We expect our participants… To be courteous and work together and be mindful of each other on track and not try to force the issue. So that’s kind of my big goal there is I’m walking the paddock, I’m talking to folks.

How’s it going out there? Is there anything that you need me to know? Because I’m not out on track with them, right? If there’s an issue, people generally tell me, and then I can go and chat with the folks who need to be chatted with and we can get that cleared up. But so far, it really hasn’t been an issue.

We stress that in the driver’s meeting, that we need to be courteous and that we need to work together, and people are generally very aware of that. Though we wouldn’t limit anyone from kind of practicing between their own two cars, we’re not going to see that in mass. It’s very uncommon.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you guys do any simulated starts?

Sometimes that’s important for different groups to do either rolling or standing or any of those kinds of things. Do you set up for that?

Charlie Streicher: We have not seen that. I’m not aware of any organization that does that. Set up, you know, I think that that might be something that’s appropriate for like a private test if anybody wants to do that.

Mostly what we’re built for is, is [00:13:00] folks who want to do driver development and want to, you know, work on set up at cars and such.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, I could just envision teams. You mentioned SRO with maybe 2 cars or 4 cars, and they’re all running, you know, nose to tail or doing some sort of exercises that they might want to work on, you know, traffic management, things like that.

So I could see that playing out with such an open amount of space on track.

Charlie Streicher: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, they’re welcome to do it. Generally speaking, I think that what test days are used for our driver development, have your gentlemen drivers come out and try to find some pace, work on a little bit of setup.

Some teams will be working on running in certain components and whatnot as well. You know, again, at 25 cars, I think it’s generally pretty clean.

Crew Chief Eric: You mentioned earlier street car versus race car is every car that’s coming to a max track time event. Caged, logbooked, you know, maybe club racing level on up type of vehicle, or are there people bringing, let’s say, a hypercar or supercar?

What does the field look like?

Charlie Streicher: So our insurance will actually not allow anything without a roll cage, racing seat, and racing harness. That’s [00:14:00] the bare minimum that our insurance allows out on track. We’d be open to time attack cars, I’d say, at a minimum. Assuming that, you know, everyone’s vetted and the driver’s comfortable with open track, open passing.

But typically speaking, the group that we attract is going to be race car drivers looking to do testing. And they’ll be coming from, say, the PCA, Porsche Sprint Challenge, SRO, IMSA. We have a partnership with WRL, so we are targeting that group very heavily and making sure that they are aware of our service and what we can provide for them.

Crew Chief Eric: So you mentioned caged cars and you mentioned trialers, time attack, et cetera. So in a lot of trial organizations, the minimum that they follow for safety a lot of times are hill climb rules, which means half back cages, not full cages. So do you differentiate there? Or as long as you have some sort of cage harness Hans, what’s the minimum in terms of being caged?

Charlie Streicher: So our insurance will allow you to have a halfback cage. However, right now I’m restricting it to full cage. Just as we work out the format. If it ends up that we feel comfortable doing halfback cages in the [00:15:00] future, then we will, but for now it’s full cage.

Crew Chief Eric: So Charlie, we’re talking about all the different cars, and I’m curious, you know, we talked about the limits of, you know, maybe bringing in a streetcar, a supercar, something like that.

It’s gotta have a cage, all these kinds of things. But what about vintage cars and also. Open wheel. Do you guys mix it up?

Charlie Streicher: I almost wish we could with the open wheel. Cause I get so many emails from folks asking if we open up to open wheels and maybe, maybe that’s something on the horizon, you know, maybe that’s a, maybe we’ll do some open wheel exclusive events.

You know, I used to do some driving in pro Mazdas and such, and in those cars, the last thing I’d want to be pulling up next to is a GT car. Like that would be terror. Like, you know, what happens to you? Lock wheels and brake and that car is going upside down. That’s the last thing that I’d want at one of these events, is to have an open wheel and a closed wheel car on the track at the same time.

Crew Chief Eric: Have you thought about maybe carving out a session for open wheel guys and kind of splitting up the day a little bit?

Charlie Streicher: I try to not divert from the format. Folks like the format that will keep it that way. I am very tempted in the future to try to carve out [00:16:00] one or two open wheel events and just see how they do because the demand is definitely there.

I think there’s a group down in Florida that actually does open testing events exclusively for open wheel guys, and it’s been pretty popular.

Crew Chief Eric: We have some open wheel guys here too, and they say all the time, they’re like, there’s never anywhere to go to practice. I got to practice. When I’m there for, you know, the regionals or the runoffs or whatever it is, and it’s to their disadvantage all the time that there’s nowhere to go.

Charlie Streicher: Yeah, totally. You pretty much have to have a private membership at a place. If you want to drive those things, you know, like, uh, you know, Audubon Country Club, they have that open wheel group and it’s pretty much dominated by. Local, you know, USF teams coming down to tennis just because you don’t have the opportunity.

Crew Chief Eric: So what about the vintage guys? Are they able to run with the modern cars too? Is there any restrictions there?

Charlie Streicher: Yeah, I’d love to have vintage guys come out. I’m a huge fan of vintage cars. I love going down even just watching SVRA and HSR cars run around. I think as long as they’re appropriate. You know, I’d love to have them out.

You know, I’m not going to have a, uh, like an old Model T ripping around on track, but… No,

Crew Chief Eric: I’m thinking like e prepared Triumphs and [00:17:00] MGs and stuff like that, you know?

Charlie Streicher: Totally. We’ll take them. Especially if they, you know, we got a test at VIR in May. Anybody wants to have some very early testing for the runoffs, they’re welcome to come on out and bring whatever they’ve got.

Crew Chief Eric: Now with those e prepared cars, they’re not full cage, right? You’ve seen them. So will that fit in for your guy’s insurance?

Charlie Streicher: Yeah, you know, cause again, the insurance, it’s a half cage rule. But I think that, I guess my differentiation there would be that that is truly a race car. You know, you can race it wheel to wheel.

It’s appropriate to do so. Then I have no issue with that one coming out.

Crew Chief Eric: A lot of cases for these teams, whether it’s club racers that are coming out or SRO teams or WRL teams, et cetera, there’s a whole staff of folks between, you know, the trainers and the engineers and the crew and all this kind of stuff.

But somewhere in there, we’re here to learn. Tests, we’re working with the car and all this kind of stuff. Does max track time offer any pro coaching, or do you guys have people on staff that can jump in and work, especially with the AM AMs, the new guys or the rookies or any of those [00:18:00] folks that are really trying to come up quickly?

Charlie Streicher: I would love to offer that. I’ve actually explored that typically with the IMSA teams and the SRO teams, you hit the nail on the head. They usually have folks on their end who do that. And so I’m trying to not interfere too much with their programs. Most of these teams have a trusted coach that they work with, and I think that sometimes it can be a little inappropriate to toss a coach in there who they don’t know and, you know, kind of shove their way in.

So we try not to impose that on folks in our group. We do have some very qualified folks who do race and IMSA and SRO and whatnot, who could if needed, but we’re not going to have that at the forefront of our offering. What our offering mostly focuses on is making sure that we can take care of the folks, catering, beverage service, coffee, what have you, the stuff that most teams might not bring with them, our events in the past, you know, the teams kind of vary in scale.

And the 1 thing that they all benefit from is having nice warm lunch.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m sure there are a lot of people that are interested in finding out more about how do I get [00:19:00] involved in this? I got a car that qualifies. I need some track time. I don’t want to go to a DE and I don’t want to learn on the fly either.

So it comes down to cost and how do you register and things like that. So let’s talk about some of those details.

Charlie Streicher: So what we do is we have two tiers of events. I think that this is one of our differentiators with max track time versus some of the other open track organizations out there. Typically the format is find a pro race weekend, find a couple of days just outside of the testing band window, book those and then go, it’ll be a Wednesday, Thursday, what have you.

Our focus is. A lot of folks who are going racing with these organizations, especially on, you know, like kind of am level of the pro am the value in testing is gaining experience, getting miles in the car, and it matters less if you’re testing at the track that you’re going to be racing at. That’s incredibly valuable.

No doubt. But I think that the most valuable test of these folks are the ones that they can make. So that’s why we focused so hard on booking tracks like NCM, CMP, [00:20:00] Hallet. You know, they’re not those huge Premier Pro tracks. They’re not Daytona. They’re not COTA, which we do host events at as well. But for the two day events at these tracks, they’re on weekends.

So for folks who are racing in these Pro Am series, who a lot of times the business owners, they’re having a great opportunity cost by having to take four days off to fly to the track, do two days on a Wednesday, Thursday, and then fly home on Friday. We’ve eliminated that conflict. Our NCM event, for example, or our NOLA event at the beginning of the year, next year, are both on Saturday, Sunday, allowing for those people who are not full time drivers to come out and practice in the case of like NCM, HAL, and C& P.

Sure, it might not be the track that they’re going to be racing at, but you’re getting miles in the car, you’re getting exposure to corners in a low pressure environment where you’re unlikely to come across, you know, an LMP2 car that’s going to be sharing the track with you. So, you know, registration, we work through motorsports reg folks can just go to our website, click on the events tab and then find the event they want to attend and then go through that, click on that.

And then it’ll take you to the motorsport reg pays. They can click that [00:21:00] all out there being that this is a semi private testing event, 25 cars limited for 16 hours of track time. The pricing does follow that the 4, 500 ballpark for the. More regional tracks that we attend that will be priced lower 2, 500 bucks, you know, and so that’s our, our goal having this offering at the pro tracks, close to the pro weekends.

And then the regional tracks further off of a pro weekend is to allow folks who want to test. To be able to have that access without being limited to one type of option. So for the more price sensitive folks, the more club focused folks, we have those more regional tracks at a more reasonable offering for the more pro series focused folks.

We have the big pro tracks closer to the province.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you guys have a track that you call home somewhere? That’s the closest that you see yourself doing the most events at?

Charlie Streicher: You know, we’re a WRL team. We run the two Stratus Racing NPO1s in WRL. So we really like [00:22:00] going to those tracks. The schedule that we will follow will be the one that most closely follows the WRL schedule.

Crew Chief Eric: What about for you? What’s home?

Charlie Streicher: So I grew up in Chicago. I was the Audubon country club wrote America where my two home tracks wrote America was actually the track. I did my first ever track day at a little intense for, uh, someone doing their first track day. I remember I took my Mustang out. It was a MVP track time event.

And you know, they do a lead follow and I pull back in at the end of my session. And my friend’s like, how fast are you guys? And I went 80 miles an hour and I was so hyped and thought that was amazing. Looking back at it, that’s.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s not the now, right?

Charlie Streicher: Yeah, that’s your min speed some places. You know, now I live down in Raleigh, North Carolina.

So I’m about an hour and a half from BIR. I, uh, I try to get up there as much as I can. It’s a, it’s a great track, great facility.

Crew Chief Eric: And the CMP is not too far.

Charlie Streicher: It’s not, you know, I, I haven’t been able to go there as much as I like our last test that we had scheduled at CMP. I was getting my bags into my car to go.

And then I got a call from our team owner that the lift gate on the semi broke. And so [00:23:00] we couldn’t get any of the cars down there. And so, you know, we paid for the track, but we didn’t go to it. You know, I am excited to go back next year at the end of March. I think that’s going to be a great event.

Crew Chief Eric: You said there really isn’t a tech session per se.

You kind of just visually looking over the car to make sure a lot of the folks that are coming are more professional teams, things like that. Is there a form or anything that has to be filled out ahead of time or any sort of paperwork, medical documentation, anything that needs to be submitted to you guys before showing up for the event?

Charlie Streicher: With the cars, these teams know more about the cars than I do. You know, they’re professional teams. They’ve been doing this for their careers. I think that it’s just fine for them to bring them out. If I see something that looks a miss, you know, while I’m kind of wandering the paddock and chatting with folks, that’s when the issue will be raised, but overall, these are professional teams coming out and testing their cars.

I trust them to prep their cars appropriately. And then the drivers, they’re all race license drivers. So they have their appropriate medicals in order to have those licenses.

Crew Chief Eric: So what other services does max track time offer that people might not be aware of? What are some of the changes that are coming for the next few seasons?

What’s [00:24:00] the future look like for max track time?

Charlie Streicher: The thing that I’m really excited about is this partnership that we’ve announced with WRL. So what we will be doing next year is hosting Thursday test days ahead of every available weekend that they have. So I believe that that’s Confirmed at eight weekends.

So we have a full open track. The WRL ones are limited to 30 cars just because there is that big of a demand amongst that group. And a lot of these tracks are big enough that 30 cars is still appropriate to get a good lap in. We’ll be offering that same format with that same catered lunches that we provide for the WRL teams that want to attend.

So. As WRL grows and it gets massive, these weekends have kind of turned into four day weekends where individual teams would rent the Thursdays ahead of time. And then they’d call up their buddies and then share the track with a few folks. And we thought that it would be good if we took the onus off the teams of having to rent the track, but also make sure that it’s opened up to the entire WRL paddock and everybody who wants to participate.

And so I think that that is going to be a really promising opportunity for a lot of these teams to get more seat time. And prepare for the weekend as they need to, especially with their rental drivers [00:25:00] who might be seeing the track for the first time and could really benefit for an extra day.

Crew Chief Eric: We’ve come to that part of the episode where I always like to ask any shout outs, promotions or anything else you’d like to mention that we haven’t covered thus far.

Charlie Streicher: Sure. You know, uh, I’d love to shout out to Sebeko. You know, they build an awesome car. We’ve had a lot of fun racing it for the past couple of years. And, you know, as the WRL GTU class grows, I think that the competition we have is, uh, incredible. You know, I can’t wait to see what happens next year. So I’d love to do a shout out here for WRL, their offering is absolutely incredible.

I think that coming from Skippy, you know, after Skippy ended up closing down a few years ago, it was tough to find a place that had those same values and brought that same value and experience to racers. And I think that WRL has done an amazing job at creating a professional level atmosphere for racers who are either on the pro end and coming in or, or coming up.

into racing for the first time.

Crew Chief Eric: Max Track Time understands that many drivers have obligations outside of racing, and they have worked diligently to obtain dates [00:26:00] on or near weekends. That way, participants with careers outside of racing are able to attend and maximize their experience without having to compromise.

So if you’re interested in attending a Max Track Time event, you can get more details by visiting them at www. maxtracktime. com or follow them on social at Max track time on Instagram and Facebook. Well, Charlie, I can’t thank you enough for coming on break fix and telling us all about max track time.

I’m actually really excited about this. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are too. This is a haven for those of us that need to shake down our cars, test our cars. Get away from massive amounts of traffic at your standard HPD or club race type weekend and really get in tune with our vehicles and tune up our vehicles at the same time.

So, I really appreciate you providing this service to the motor sports community at large. This is really amazing. And I wish you guys the best of success in 23 and beyond.

Charlie Streicher: Thank you very much, Eric. I appreciate you guys having me on. This has been an awesome experience.

Crew Chief Eric: No worries. Thank you.

Charlie Streicher: Thank you so much.

It’s been a pleasure. Take [00:27:00] care.

Crew Chief Brad: You can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports. org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of BreakFix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge.

As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag. For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and [00:28:00] other volunteers fed on their strict diet of Fig Newtons, Gummy Bears, and Monster.

Consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com. dot Patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports. And remember without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Brake/Fix Podcast
• 00:45 Meet Charlie Streicher: From Petrol-head to Operations Manager
• 01:11 Charlie’s Journey into Racing
• 02:34 Choosing the Perfect Track Car
• 05:04 MaxTrackTime: The Concept and Evolution
• 08:11 MaxTrackTime Event Experience
• 13:39 Safety and Car Requirements
• 23:56 Future Plans and Partnerships
• 25:03 Conclusion and Contact Information

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