It is not too early to start talking to friends, family, co-workers, enemies, people on the street and anyone else you come across for donations to RAL.

What is RAL?

For those that are new, Racing Against Leukemia is an annual charity event held at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon NH to benefit Leukemia Research. It is the only time of the year that all three programs, Rally (inc. RallyCross), Road Racing and Solo are together on the same weekend.

When?

August 23rd

How does Solo raise money?

The event is run this way:

You register like you normally would and pay the entry fee, picking your number and class. You also purchase your run tickets at registration. In the morning, each competitor uses his/her tickets for practice (pledge) runs. The rate is $10 per run. You MUST turn in actual donations (checks and/or cash) in the amount that you are pledging. Monies not in hand at registration do not count. You can run in any car that has passed tech (and the car owner allows you to run it, no jumping in the Elise when Russ is not looking). You can take as many runs as you would like provided you have enough tickets (and we have enough time). Sort of like fun runs, but done at the beginning of the event

In the afternoon, we run qualifying. Everyone gets three runs in the car/class that they registered in. The top 16 in PAX/RTP ranking go on to the Challenge rounds. Everyone else works. The challenge rounds are a run-off similar to a ProSolo. The top seed faces the bottom seed, second faces second to last, ect, all done based on the PAX. From here it is win or go work until we have the winner of the Jeff Gordon Trophy. We also do the same for the top four Novices for the Bill Goodale Trophy.

Wow, ten dollars per practice run is steep.

Most competitors get donations for this event. We have had a number of high dollar amounts in the past few years. Last year, Solo raised over $6,000. This year we want to top that by at least 25%.

Here's the incentive. Anyone raising over $1,000 automatically makes the challenge. These people will also be seeded at the top based on total amount of money raised. If no one raises $1,000 then the person that brings in the most gets in as the #1 seed.

As another incentive, anyone raising more than $500 can change the the class they are running in up until 11AM (this includes the people that bring in $1,000.) This means that you can try out a few cars and pick the car that you feel has the best chance of winning that day on that course.