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
