Hello everyone,

Just a quick note to say that plans for the Downtown Oakville Race Classic set
for Sunday July 17, 2005 continue to progress. Today we had a 2 hour meeting
with the Town of Oakville to agree on a race course and I am pleased to say that
we now have a course design that the Town of Oakville Roads Dept and the
Oakville Parking Operations has approved. The course is a technical
counter-clockwise circuit consisting of 6 left turns and 2 right turns and is
shown in the attached Word file. The start/finish will be located in the
downtown square which will also serve as the awards area and possibly an area
for food and music during and after the race (The BIA may want to continue the
event throughout the afternoon with live music and food provided by a couple of
the local BIA members). When you look at the course you will see that it will
be very spectator friendly, especially coming out of turn #8 (Navy St) onto
Lakeshore and will allow awesome sprint speeds because it is a slight downhill
to the finish line, and this stretch will likely be where most of the spectators
will gather in the various coffee shops etc.

The next step is to get the official blessing from the downtown BIA but this may
be more of a formality since the president and the BIA Chairwoman have both
promised their 100% support for the event. So perhaps it may now be time to
start thinking about getting the club involved and a race committee formed.
Starting in January there will be lots of help needed from as many people who
can help. One item that came up today is that we must distribute a letter by
mid-Jan to all residences, business and churches within the affected areas to
advise them and allow them to raise issues. We will also need to think about
setting up a dedicated website containing all race and road closure info, etc.
For the actual event we will need as many volunteers as possible.

Once again, the July 17th is the same weekend as Midnight madness where crowds
in the core reach 60,000 people, and it is also the mid-way point for the Tour
de France which should be a great way to get people interested in the event. As
for the actual racers, July has been typically a slow month on the road calendar
and the only other event scheduled this weekend is a race in Ottawa, so we
should see lots of interest from all off the southern Ontario clubs, of which
Oakville is conveniently located in the exact geographic middle of all these
clubs!.

Hopefully we can all get 100% behind this event and help out in some form. If
it is a success it could very well become an annual event and a great way to
promote, grow and generate revenue for the club.

Cheers,

Dave Campbell

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