Air Racing: Past, Present, Future - Tony Logoteta

All right, ladies and gentlemen, David Costa, Renegade Aviator with a new feature this year. And it's a commemoration of something near and dear to my heart. I know a bunch of you people out there listening today, something that has been a part of everybody's lives for many, many years. We're looking at, you know, 60 years since the Reno Air Races, the National Championship Air Races have been in Reno, Nevada, and I am pleased today to have a special guest. We put out a press release a couple days ago about... Doing a podcast, keeping you people informed, entertained, hopefully, and up to date on what's going on with the National Championship Air Races, the Reno Air Racing Association. So I am joined today by Tony Lagateta, who's the COO of the Reno Air Race Association. Hey, Tony, how you doing? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing fantastic, as always. It's been a 3 a.m. wake up for me. I'm in the... Silicon Valley right now, flying airplanes, having fun. What could be worse than that? But certainly not as busy as you of your team have been. And you see the. graphic I have up there. And then there were three. Three. So everybody is on pins and needles. You look at social media, people are jumping up and down. What's going to happen? What's going on? So what a better way to start the show than put the man with the plan. Tony, if you could just give us a brief update, I think we'd all appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me on, Dave. Appreciate it. It's good to talk to everybody out there. I know there's a lot of folks wondering what's going on and excited about the future you know I think as I've mentioned to you you know first disappointed but now we realize it's not the end it's it's a new beginning and it's exciting it's a lot of work but uh it's a lot of fun too so yeah we're down to casper pueblo and roswell those are our final three locations for the relocation in 2025 is the planned next racing event We are in the middle of sort of an exchange of information, I will say, between us and those locations as we evaluate who the final location will be. We've done several site visits, including visits by some current and former racers, so we can take everybody's kind of opinion and area of expertise and into account when we make the decision because it's not just about what Rara thinks is best. We also have a partnership with the racing classes and that's important to us. We want to make sure that they're comfortable with what we're looking at as well. So it's been a lot of trips with folks from the ops team and the board and staff and racers and We're at the point where we know kind of what we need from the three and we're evaluating what they think they need from us and they're evaluating what we need from them. We're exchanging information. We're studying and dissecting and figuring things out. And we really hope to have a final announcement by mid-April. That's our plan. Excellent. And, you know, that's that's what I think. I think most of us understand how huge of a task that you're facing, but maybe not. Right. So some people will say, well, gosh, you know what? Where's the update? What are we doing? Well, this is what. why we're doing this event like this each week because I think um you've expressed to me that you want to keep these fans and the racers involved but really I mean if you give us an inside look at just with the amount of work that you guys are doing yeah absolutely no I'd be happy to I can run you through kind of the process from the beginning so when the announcement came out well I guess it's almost exactly a year ago now it was last march uh that 23 was going to be the final racing event in reno We immediately announced that we were going to work to keep the event alive and move it to a new location. And from then until we finished the official RFP document that we were able to put out, we received 38 inquiries expressing interest in being the next home of the National Championship Air Races. That was really encouraging right off the bat. You know, that got us excited about the future. We got the RFP done by, I think it was the beginning of June last year. Maybe it was May. I might be getting my dates wrong. It might have been late May. Got that out to those locations and released it publicly so that any other locations that hadn't come to the table at that point could reach out. And from there, we then planned three, or excuse me, two bidders conferences here in Reno at Stead Airport. And we had those in June and July. We had 11 of the 38. So once they saw the RFP, a lot of them said, oh, wait, this is a bit more than we can handle at our airport or in our community or whatever, which was the purpose, right? We knew some of those locations couldn't actually do it. Right. So out of those, 11 came to the two bidders conferences. multi-day conferences we ran them through really long presentations and gave them a lot of in-depth detail about what it takes to put on this event because we don't want anybody going in blindfolded not understanding what it really takes to do this because it's a huge endeavor from the 1200 volunteers to staff and board and pilots and crews and all those folks that are out here making this thing happen, sponsors and service providers, all that. It's a big task to make this event happen. So we want them to have their eyes wide open and understand really what goes into it. so we did those in june and july and then in uh beginning of august I think the first week of august was when we received the full proposals and we received the six full proposals out of the 11 that came to the bitter bitter conferences that felt they could hold the full event in their community and that was the three that are remaining plus wendover utah thermal california and buckeye arizona So those were the initial six that submitted those full proposals. We evaluated those, did site visits to all six with the selection committee and came back to a whole bunch more work and figuring out which of those could actually hold the whole event. And there's so many factors that go into it. um there's geographical factors there's you know can you actually put all the race courses our biggest race course currently is about eight miles so can you put that over the ground that they have available they have enough ramp space they have the runways you know all those factors that go into it hotels oh yeah absolutely there's there's so many different economic factors as well so we looked at all those and then came back and said okay these three give us the best opportunity for the for the next round um to come down to the final location. So that kind of brings you up to where we're at now. It's been pretty constant work by the team ever since we started back in, I'd say since the RFP was released, there's not been a time where we weren't working on this. So it's definitely been a big endeavor, but it's important. So- A big endeavor without unlimited funds and unlimited time. It's a fairly skeleton staff that you run with. Everybody talks about money, money, money, but it takes time and energy as well. For you and your team to put the energy into this, I don't want to sound Pollyanna with it, but I think a lot of us that talk about, hey, I would love to see an event happen. Are we willing to stand tall and help, right, to be of some kind of help, whether that be just talking it up amongst ourselves or supporting the people that are out there doing the work? Because no matter what city we pick, right, no matter what happens, there's always going to be somebody to say, well, why not? not this and I think this is why having you is so important because there's so many factors that go into what you're going through to select a place where we can continue this this long tradition of air racing where else can you go see something like this absolutely nowhere right nowhere there's nowhere else you could go see what we do here that's what makes it so special right well really it's the people that make it special but that's what draws them here in the first place um and it's yeah you're absolutely right um We can all support each other and support volunteers. And there's just so many things we can do to help. There is. And, you know, and Reno's not, Reno has got something really cool happening anyway in 2024. And I don't want to get too far afield because this is huge news. And, you know, I've been to Reno a long time. So have you. We always talked about an air show. Well, rah-rah's not going away. We're going to be there in 2024. 2024. Tell us about that. Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the things we talked about when we got down to the final year discussion with the airport authority was, you know, Hey, what about a, what about a 60th event air show? And they said, yeah, that sounds, that sounds good. You know, it's because we missed 2020 due to COVID last year, what would have been our 60th, but ended up being our 59th. So we're able to put together an air show for this year, which is really exciting. And then of course, we ended up getting the Blue Angels and the Snowbirds and the F-16. So that was incredibly exciting. So October 4th through 6th, 2024, that will be the air show. And we are incredibly excited to celebrate 60 years here and just have a blowout, exciting air show. We've got several civilian acts booked along with of course the military acts, and it's just gonna be a really fun weekend. Well, you know, I was sitting at ICAST and we're sitting there and they're announcing all the military acts. And then I hear Reno and I went, what? I kind of looked up, you know, and then I go, Blue Angels. I go, oh, that's really cool. Reno's having an air show. And then all of a sudden the Snowbirds and then the Viper demo. And I think we all walked out of the hallway and there were certain people walking around with it. real smug face, and that was an outstanding accomplishment. I don't know how you guys pulled it off. I think we about floated out of that room pretty much. It was exciting. I can say our military coordinator, Terry Marshall, and some others put in some incredibly hard work behind the scenes to make those things happen. We also had some really good support. I won't throw any names out necessarily, but big thank yous to some of our political figures here in the state. who might have done some work on our part. So we really appreciate everything that everyone did because it was a lot of hard work. And honestly, getting both was a big surprise. When the Snowbirds announcement came, I went, oh, wow, both of them. You got to be kidding me. Sweet. And then we got the F-16 on top of that. So all of it was just pretty incredible. Yeah. was incredible and yeah terry terry really worked hard with that um he's such a low-key guy and uh other names as well that that we all know bobby uh and everybody else just everybody on your team is just fantastic this is a world-class air show in reno so nobody's turning their back on anybody it's you know saying there's it's a really fun this is going to be a fun event um But going back into the air racing, since we have racers that ask about, well, you know, what's going to be different or are all the classes going to be represented? Could you talk a little bit about that? Are there any is it going to be similar to what we've come to love or there going to be some differences? At the future location you're talking about, right? I am, yes. Yes, yeah. So when we get to the next location, we absolutely intend to include all seven classes that we had in the past. Of course, in 23, we had six classes because the biplane class was not together at that time. We hope that they are all sorted out and re-accredited and back to racing in 2025 so that we will be back to having all seven classes racing at that event. Yes, absolutely. But that has a lot to do with the individual classes as well, doesn't it, Terry? They have their own list of agenda items that they need to do? Yeah, absolutely. Everybody has to be accredited under our umbrella as the air show event producer. But we work together and we make sure that all goes through well. We talk with them throughout the year. We have quarterly meetings with the class presidents from each of the classes. Those are really productive. They allow us to stay in contact and make sure that we're all moving forward together. And if there's any issues between RARA and the classes that we're able to get them on the table and work through. And we started doing that a couple of years ago and it's been a really productive exercise. We've always met once a year. And a couple of years ago, I think it was one of the classes that brought it up as a possible positive kind of ongoing interaction between us and the classes. And it really has been very productive. So we're always in contact with them. We make sure that we're communicating and talking about each other's needs and concerns and all that good stuff. So I'm very excited. And I think that we'll have all the classes in 25. You know, I mean, overall, I mean, it's always been where the classes have worked well as, you know, as team members using as any pilots would, right? Using CRM to kind of work through. There's always going to be challenges. There's always going to be issues that need to be worked through. But that is what it is, right? I mean, I look at my young FOs now and shrug my shoulders and go, it is what it is, bud. Fly the airplane, right? which is what you guys are doing. You're flying this airplane forward. And, you know, we're down to three. And so when I get asked questions, I had some racers ask me questions through my social media. Well, you know, how do we plan? Well, my answer is, through, I guess, would start simply, plan on 2025. The rest might be stay tuned. Absolutely, because some of the factors that are going to play into it is the different locations, different climates, different weather patterns. we don't know the exact weekend that the event will end up being. It's gonna be dependent on the location. Some of them have different events on different weekends that will cause us to wanna move. So we're kind of keeping that open right now. It looks like it's gonna be in that fall timeframe still. So that's good, but I don't, you know, we can't give a specific weekend until we figure out what the final location is and work out all the details with them. Well, I'm going to say this, I'm going to hedge it because my wife could walk in and hit me on the side of the head. But she always asks me questions, what are we doing next week? And I'm going, but wait a second, we're here today. So what are we doing today? So everything is a step in a process. And I think if we allow ourselves as fans, right, I mean, I'm a fan, you know, as a fan to get ahead of ourselves. um you know is really we ought to be smiling ear to ear because um it'd be real easy to just say that's it hands in the air we're done um but but to know that we're down to three out of you said 38 different locations expressed interest what was interesting to me though is how many did not submit the required application. So many people say, I want to get into aviation. I go, well, have you gone to a local flight school? Well, no. So it's the same thing. I want to host the national championship air race. It starts with a package. You take those packages, and you've been doing all those steps to get these things qualified. One of the questions that had come up was, and I'll bring it up. We had a talk. about it briefly, insurance. Everybody's concerned, will we have insurance? So could you answer that to quell everybody's nerves? Yes, absolutely. I don't see any concerns with us being able to acquire insurance. One of the problems was the last couple of years was the level of insurance that we had to purchase that came up in 2022. And it's been part of the discussion process with all the locations. What level of liability coverage is is reasonable for our broker? And we're just having those discussions with the locations to say, look, there's a certain point where you're way beyond reasonable if you expect us to go to that level. You know, we have a very reasonable and very extremely high insurance policy. So that's what we're working with and we're not, I'm not really concerned that we'll be able to get insurance. We've gotten it at an absolutely ridiculously high liability limit the last two years, and it's been really expensive, but we're able to get it. So I'm not too concerned about that. And all of the locations have expressed great interest in partnering and helping with that. So I think we're in a good place there. Outstanding. That's great to hear. You know, the other big question I was getting And again, just so everybody knows, I really do have a series of questions. I wrote them all down. Dave Costa, the renegade aviar, Ken Ray. Reading. Well, let's see. But one of the big ones was live streaming, which I think is great. Right. We all love live stream. You know, I love even better when people buy tickets to something because that helps support. All the cool stuff. But the live stream went from soup to nuts, right? How can we monetize a live stream versus how can we get a sponsor behind that? Maybe could you help out a little bit with what the process has been there? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, from the standpoint of monetizing the live stream, as far as selling it, we've actually looked into that, making it a pay-per-view type live stream or having different levels to where maybe there's a basic that's free and then you tear up into some different levels of pay-per-view live stream. The problem you run into is, or that we've run into, I should say, is... how do you balance sponsorship dollars for the live stream and needing those uh needing people to watch it in order to justify the sponsor dollars versus then monetizing it to the customer or the consumer and charging for the live stream so up to this point um Steel was a big part of what they did was broadcast and live stream. That was the big draw for them. So between them and then also our CBA here and here in town, those those were those were two big sponsors for the live stream and the broadcast production that we did after the fact. So we didn't quite get to a point where You know, you've got the guarantee over here and you've got to take a chance at selling it over here. And it just it didn't pencil out in the future. Hopefully we can do a little more research and figure out how that might work to where maybe we can balance that out a little bit. But in 2023. It was the final year, and we want everybody to see who can see. And we want everybody to come who has never been or who hasn't been in a long time or has it on their bucket list. And we didn't want to go to a pay-per-view for that last one. We wanted everyone to see it. And that's huge. I think the fans want to hear stuff like that because you've got – All of you at the Reno Airways Association, I mean, you're also fans. So to kind of think of the people that maybe couldn't make it into an event to have them see the event. You know, I've been in sales my whole life. And one of the hardest things I've ever had to do is sell sponsorships. I've sold medical equipment. I've sold airplanes. planes right I mean but selling a sponsorship everybody goes well it's easy just get this company to throw all this money and you're going well you've got to have the viewership to make that quote-unquote sponsorship worth it and it's a dance and it's tough to um quantify that I haven't figured it out uh you know not that I'm some some great genius in anything but um You know, I mean, am I misrepresenting anything there? I mean, it's not just an easy sell to say, hey, come out and livestream our event. There's money involved on both parties. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the broadcast and the livestream. So that's the money that we have to raise. And when you've got a couple of sponsors that are willing to put in enough to cover that, it's pretty tough to walk away from that versus, you know, going out and taking a chance on doing a pay-per-view type event. I would say from a sponsorship sales standpoint, first thing, of course, with any sales, you gotta believe in the product, right? So we all love this, just like the fans love it. I mean, we have the best fans in the world. They showed it the way they showed up in 2023, you know, incredible support from the fans and I don't know, volunteers as well. Like which ones have a greater level of support for the event? They're just, they're phenomenal. We have the best volunteers, the best fans. It's pretty incredible. Well, we always tell people this, and I didn't mean to interrupt you there, but, you know, volunteers take a lot of grief at events from the long, long work and from the fans themselves. So I tell the fans and performers at air shows and events, thank those volunteers because that's why they're there. They are there for us. Those fans are there for us at an air show or at any kind of aviation event. And, you know, kind of a shout out to everybody. You want to see an event like Air Racing promoted, do it yourself. What can we do ourselves? I mean, how can we help Reno Air Racing Association? You know, in this world of modern technology and modern marketing tools, social media in particular, of course, everybody can help anybody who has a platform maybe anybody who has a social media account can help I mean just share stuff talk about it I mean it's it there's never been a time where it was I'll say easier right to uh share information about an event or about a business or their location um so there's so much that people can do to help out marketing dollars are expensive advertising dollars are incredibly expensive you know the budgets are tight I mean, I mentioned the insurance policy in these last few years. That is it's so high that it that it limits some of what we can do in other areas. And I think that's stuff that, you know, people don't necessarily necessarily realize. But there's not too many events where, you know, 25, 30 percent of their income goes towards insurance. So that's that's us. And it's very rare. So anything people can do help. It just helps a ton. Share it. Talk about it. There's there's so many things you can do. Well, one of the questions I have here is about specifically on the Unlimiteds. Anything you can add on that? I mean, everybody has their favorite class. Mine happens to be Jets. But everybody has their favorite. Anything on the Unlimiteds stuff that you want to share? As far as membership goes and what we think the future looks like? Yeah, I mean, it's so tough. I mean, you know, I don't own it. On a P-51 Mustang, I can barely afford a TS-11 Iskra. So, you know, so, you know, I think we got to realize, too, these are aging airplanes. We love them to death. Right. But, you know, it's become so expensive for a racer to maintain the aircraft to the standard, you know, a Strega or a Voodoo or any of these other really super fast, highly modified racers. Yeah. The amount that it costs them to rebuild the engine every year after running it here at the speeds that people grew accustomed to in the past, you're talking minimum probably quarter of a million dollars just to get it going again. And when you start talking about trying to put five or 10 of those out there, you can do the math fairly quickly and realize that, oh boy, we really have to increase our budget by like, 50 to 70% in order to get there sometimes, you know? So it's a tough one. It's really tough. And a lot of them have also been moved back to stock because the value at stock is so high now. I mean, we're talking about a few million dollar aircraft now. And it's, it's a challenge, but what I would kind of say to folks is let's celebrate what we have. Um, we've got some fast aircraft out there. You know, we have some beautiful aircraft out there. Some people have some incredible, um, incredible warbirds that are willing to bring them out here and race them. They may not be running close to 500 miles an hour, although we did have one that was pretty close this last year, right? Um, what Justin and Steve-O did and their crews did with Bardahl was pretty special. But celebrate what we have. I mean, it's pretty incredible. This is it's racing history. It's it's aviation history. It's our, you know, we're It's our firepower history and it's pretty incredible that we can still put them out there and have them race. I think it's to be celebrated. So we're gonna keep pushing forward and we're gonna keep trying to increase the purse to get as many of them here as we can and to pay them as much as we can possibly pay within the financial and budget constraints we have. But I can say, and just jumping to a different subject on you, sorry. But I will say from a purse standpoint, it's absolutely in our plans to increase the purse I know there's a lot of chatter there's a lot of people that talk about it and I totally get it because it is expensive to maintain these aircraft and it is part of our plan as we move to the next location when we're presenting budgets and we're talking about what we need there's absolutely increases to the purse we know it's important we absolutely value it and we know it has to go up so that's part of our planning process as we as we look at the new location Which is fantastic news, by the way, because just the fact that you bring that up, I mean, it's, you know, that's part of why people race, but that's not the only reason. And if we support what comes out, what's there, what's there, we... Buy the tickets. We promote it. That's the way to get the purses to come up. That's the way to get more sponsorships. It's this double edged sword is that. So we go back as we're coming up to our to our 30 minute mark here. It really is about it's about us. Right. I mean, right. It's about all of us together. So I have not seen many people in air racing that want people to do stuff for them. And on the flip side, it may seem harsh sometimes when we go back and expect others to do things, too. So I think... I love to be around what I call people of excellence, people that are making things happen and doing things. Ladies and gentlemen, my own soapbox, if you want to see air racing continue, you've got to support it. You've got to be there. Give a nod back and forth to anybody involved in air racing because we can't. I don't think failure is an option anymore. This is it. This is it. Where else? I mean, I don't know anybody else racing airplanes anymore. anywhere not like we do it not six classes on the pylons plus stole drag you know there's nowhere else you can see it in the world unless we get put back together exactly no any any um final comments from from your side tony uh anything um I can't believe it's been a half hour already that was fast yes it goes quick You know, again, I want to thank the fans. Just been incredible in support. And this last year was pretty amazing and really encouraging to see just how many people love the sport, love the event, to see the kind of support that they gave us. And I, again, want to thank the volunteers because there's no way, no way you could put this event on without all those folks that come out and volunteer their time. It would be impossible. 1,200 plus people that give their time out here. um and that's just under the rah-rah banner that doesn't count the folks that you know work on work for free as a crew member on on some of the racers and that kind of thing So a big shout out to them and go on our website, look at our About Us page under the staff and board and look at those department heads because those folks work their butts off and they're the managers of all those volunteer teams. And those folks do a great job for us as well. So those are those big volunteer groups and the fans just want to thank everybody so much. Just that's the Air Race family. And, you know, it's a pleasure to be part of it. Yeah, it's not done yet, ladies and gentlemen. There's a lot of good stuff coming. And, you know, in a half hour show once a week. Right. You're welcome back anytime, Tony. Thank you for any kind of updates. You, your staff. I think each week we just want to keep things alive. The history. There's a rich history in air racing. The present. is here. This is what we can affect. And relax on the future, right? As I say, smile and be confident that if you hear people like you giving an update, I really appreciate this because to hear it come from you, especially for this inaugural launch, it's shows a commitment. And I think, um, we just, I, I just appreciate it personally, but I think the fans do as well. I'm getting a bunch of comments on the sidebar here with that. So, um, Tony Logiteta. Logiteta. See, I pronounced your name wrong. And I'm an Italian guy, so I screwed up already. But I absolutely appreciate you coming on board. And, you know, let's stay in touch. And I'd love to talk to anybody on your team each and every week if you want to pop in and give some updates. Please do. Well, thank you very much, David. Appreciate the time and appreciate everybody who watched and has continued to support us. Exciting things to come. All right. Okay. Thanks a lot, Tony. Thank you. Bye-bye. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's a wrap. I keep it right to about 30 minutes. Fantastic to give the updates like that. Join us here every week. We'll have a different topic every week, different things. And I want to talk to you, the fans. So some of you super fans are going to be getting a call from me. But anyway, for now, this is David Costa. I'm going to have another podcast, my normal podcast, starting here in about 20 minutes. I am the Renegade Aviator. See ya.
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