In the April edition of Challenge

Let’s start out with two big announcements. First, CVR is going to be doing its very first monthly meeting of the virtual age. Vice President of Programs Jeff Coe and Programs Vice-Chair Frank Sena have been working on getting this set up for a while and are ready to go live with it. April’s virtual event will feature Brett Sloan from Sloan Motor Cars. The meeting will be held via Zoom and will start promptly at 7:00 PM. Details and signup information can be found here.

The second big announcement is about CVR’s Region Wide Food Drive last month which went off without a hitch. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Club’s Board of Directors, the volunteers who manned the drop-off locations, the locations themselves and the members who donated food and money.  Click here to read Allen Fossbender’s column, here to read Susan Young’s thank you message and here to look at the photos.

If you’ve missed your time on track for the last year, Dave Vaccaro’s announcement of the 2021 Driver Education season should be welcome signs of things getting back to normal. And don’t forget to read Maria Capella’s update on Coffee Runs for 2021, Paul Roth’s update on the CVR Photo Club, and Paul Kudra’s update on the 2021 AutoX season.

In addition to all of the above listings, there is Walt Hyjek’s article on Porsche’s 1-2-3 win at Sebring in the GTLM class and Jeff Coe’s article on the final installment of his series on bringing a 1-of-2 Matador 968 Porsche’s back to life. Other great reads include Paul Kudra’s feature article on the new Porsche Taycan Turbo S, Charles Young’s feature on Tips for the Do-It-Yourself Mechanic, and Joe Kunecki’s announcement about some exclusive Club Race 2021 gear from the CVR Store

If that isn’t enough, there’s also a new CVR website

If you’ve looked at the main CVR website recently, you’ve probably noticed some significant changes. While a redesign of the Club’s website has been an active project and was scheduled to launch later this year, that timetable was sped up considerably – and unexpectedly – after the March edition of Challenge launched. That’s because our hosting company was no longer able to support the underlying technology used by the old website and it crashed. After several hundred hours of work by Shelley, Mike, and myself, an updated website was put together and quietly launched several weeks ago.

It’s not perfect. Response times are still too slow based on some lingering problems from the old website, but it’s coming along.

There have been some major design changes

First, the new Home Page of the CVR website is cvrpca.com and not cvrpca.org. We did that because we did some things to speed up the delivery of the website. That needed to be done in a “clean” environment which necessitated the move from a .org domain to a .com domain.

Second, the Home Page has been radically redesigned, and should (hopefully) be easier to use. It’s divided into 3 primary sections: About CVR, Activities, and External Links. Each of those primary sections contains subsections, identified by a tile with an image and icon. Click on any tile to get to the page.

Third, Challenge has been moved to its proper location on the web.  You can reach it by going to cvrpca.com/challenge. Don’t worry though, the old URL still works fine.

Fourth, the main navigation at the top of all pages has been both expanded and simplified. Again, we hope that will make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for. On a desktop or laptop, just hover your mouse over any of the categories listed to see an expanded list of what’s available in the section. (On a mobile device, just tap the label with your finger to expand the menu).

• The section labeled About CVR contains everything that was on the old website.
• The section labeled CHALLENGE Magazine contains all of the monthly columns and feature articles that have always been part of Challenge.
• Club Calendar contains CVR and PCA Zone 1 events with three options for viewing (photo, list, and monthly) as well as a mini-calendar built into the menu.
• The hundreds of photos that have been contributed by our talented photographers are listed according to the event type and year in the Photo Galleries section
• Both The Mart and the CVR Store are located in the Shopping section.

There’s also a section called Club Race – I’ll get to that later on.

There are also some new features

The most prominent new feature of the website is a password-protected CVR Members section. The member’s section contains a permission-based member directory (meaning you’re only included in it if you register), the minutes from Board of Directors meetings, a name badge request form, the Club history, and forms library. As more sections are made available, this is where you’ll find them. While there are some features that still have to be added, the member section is functional. For security reasons, PCA National does not allow CVR to connect to the national PCA member database, so if you’d like to access the member area, you have to complete a separate registration process here.

Another new feature? You can now leave comments on all Challenge articles. Comments are one of the best ways for myself, the Activity Chairs, and the contributing writers to learn what you like (and don’t like). To keep everything family-friendly and politically correct, all comments are moderated and reviewed before they show up. If you want to leave a comment, please keep that in mind as you write.

And finally, Challenge now supports polls and surveys. Our first-ever poll was to see what Members thought about the new calendar options that launched this past February. While there wasn’t a huge response, a majority of people favored a “photo view” of upcoming events rather than the list view featured on the home page of the old CVR website. So that’s what we did. The results (so far) are:

We’ve also added the capability to do Surveys.  Both Polls and Surveys will appear as separate sections in the May issue of Challenge.

Last but not least: The first-ever digital Club Race Program

Of all the projects that we took on in March, the digital edition of the Club Race Program had to be the most difficult. Among the requirements:

• Come up with a way to include all the information from the printed version, but without an “index”
• Include information about Club Race on a national level and on a local level
• Highlight both national and local sponsors
• Build a section that could be updated in real-time based on racing results
• Make sure to provide a way for all of the wonderful photographs to be enjoyed by the membership
• Make this special section available as reference material for years to come

We think we’ve done that.

When you hover over the Club Race link in the navigation, you’ll find five distinct sections: About Club Race, Club Race Sponsors, Venue Information, Event Information, Club Race Photo Galleries. If you click on the main link for the Club Race section, the main page is laid out in a similar fashion to the Home Page of the new CVR website, but with the idea of having it last as a stand-alone entity for years to come.

Virtually all the advertisers from 2019 have returned for 2021, and because there is no such thing in the digital world as a “full-page” ad, we had to invent a new way for our premium sponsors to get real value from their sponsorship dollars. So at the bottom of the main page is an area called Club Race Sponsor Spotlights. A click on any of the spotlight links will take you to a full page of information about that sponsor. Each page has some information about the sponsor’s business, contact information, photographs, a map, and in at least one case, a video.

As I said, it’s been a very, very busy month.