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We attended a few Northwoods
events in the late 1970s and saw how
an annual event at a race track can tie
a region together. It might not work in
every SAAC region around the coun-
try, but it sure worked here. Road
America was on most of SAAC’s long
lists for a convention site, but we were
always a little hesitant about a con-
vention there being able to pull even a
small percentage of our membership
from both coasts, which is what is
needed to pay the bills. Looking at a
map of the U.S., eastern Wisconsin is
a relatively out-of-the-way spot.
Whenever Elkhart Lake was
brought up, there was a constant
drumbeat of publicity from the track’s
PR department about Chicagoland
(which includes parts of Indiana, Wis-
consin, Michigan and Iowa as well as
Illinois) being the third largest popu-
lation center in the U.S. The first and
second are metro New York and metro
Los Angeles (in case you cut geogra-
phy class that day). The track is about
two and a half hours north of Chicago,
but no matter how much we wanted to
give it a shot, it never looked like the
numbers were there. Chicago is a
large city but it didn’t represent a sim-
ilar proportion of SAAC members.
Having come from Lime Rock the
previous year and Atlanta, Indianapo-
lis and Watkins Glen before that, we
were gravitating towards a west coast
convention. The problem was that
finding a track was nearly impossible.
We didn’t even consider Laguna Seca
The SHELBY AMERICAN
Fall 2015 341