The SimRacing Summer Festival 2024
The idea
After our opening ceremony on August 12, 2023, when we opened our store in Lich and celebrated this with you, I had the idea to organize an annual party of this kind. I really liked the idea of organizing a SimRacing community event where like-minded people could come together and spend a nice day together. Of course, the whole thing had to be made as enjoyable as possible for the visitors. The focus should be on SimRacing, exhibiting steering wheels and providing simulators on which different hardware can be tested.
The preparation
After the festival is before the festival, according to this motto, the preparation for the SimRacing Summer Festival 2024 began shortly after the opening ceremony in 2023. The consistently positive feedback on the event naturally encouraged us to repeat such an event.
Pages and pages of notes were written down as the experiences and impressions from the opening ceremony were still fresh and therefore present. There was not much to improve, as we were already very satisfied with our first event. However, the room temperature in the simulator area was a problem that we addressed directly by installing commercial air conditioning systems. Professional air conditioning units were installed in both the showroom and the store.
The date for the party was agreed with the helpers and was quickly found. We will probably choose the first Saturday in July for this event in the future, although this is not yet set in stone and of course depends on availability, but it is an approach that I would like to stick to.
A line through the bill, yes, of course that happens too. You can plan and prepare all sorts of things, but family changes meant that we could no longer access the barbecue master from 2023. So we suddenly had to reschedule. While he had prepared the meat products as a master butcher in 2023, we now had to look for alternatives. We quickly got in touch with the manager of the Edeka supermarket in our street and were able to order all the meat products from the in-house butcher's shop, where we also had breakfast rolls and drinks. There was still the question of the barbecues and the like, as these were also brought by the master butcher last year, and we quickly realized that we needed a food truck. Luckily for us, not far from Lich there is a catering rental service that also rents out fully equipped food trucks. So here, too, we were able to put a tick in the box. Refrigerated vans and beer tent sets had already been booked for the event, so so far so good.
The consumption of food and drinks was important data for the preparations, although unlike the opening ceremony (where you had to register in advance using a form), we had no idea how many of you would be visiting us on the day. So it was more of an estimate, but generally we weren't that far off the mark. And if necessary, we had a great opportunity to get supplies from the supermarkets opposite.
A dilemma with the electricity, Friday before the party
Due to work on our photovoltaic system on the Friday before the festival, there was a massive problem with the electrical circuits in the warehouse and the store, so we had to improvise. Cable drums and extension cables were laid everywhere so that we had power at all in the important places. It was very nerve-wracking on Friday afternoon. But nobody could have anticipated such a problem beforehand. The electricians were simply at a loss but were able to identify the problem on the Monday after the festival and everything is fine again.
Racing car
The BMW 325i was driven on the Nordschleife on the weekend before the summer party as part of the RCN and was then put directly on the trailer and taken by us to Lich to put the racing car wrapped in the SimRaceShop design in the yard for viewing and photographing.
The party
The final phase began at 7 a.m. - the sales stand was set up, the food truck was prepared and the ice cream machine was put into operation. All the simulators were checked again. The first visitors were already in front of the courtyard an hour before the start of the event, but unfortunately had to wait a little longer as preparations were still in full swing.
10 a.m. - the festival is open. The first visitors ventured onto the grounds and took a look around. The champagne reception was intended to break the first ice, cold drinks were of course already available and the first sausages and burgers were already on the grills in the food truck.
The steering wheel exhibition was immediately inspected and the shifters of the steering wheels on display were clicked wildly.
As a small gift, visitors were given a bag containing a cookie and an SRS lanyard.
Various track and vehicle combinations could be driven on the 6 racing simulators and this was used extensively. Here and there were a few little tweaks, which are simply unavoidable on a day like this.
Dominik from KW Automotive / Ascher-Racing also brought some gems to our party, so some steering wheels from Ascher-Racing were exhibited and a simulator with motion system was provided for testing.
It was a special pleasure for me to meet some mods from the Discord and the SRS Feierabendcup. Julian, Mike and Dennis came to our party with great printed SRS Feierabend-Cup T-shirts to get an impression of our business and to meet many SimRacers.
Also "celebrities" were at the start, Nils aka hc_diZee and Christian aka Cuttingcorny as partners of the SimRaceShop could not miss this event. Unfortunately, Daniel aka DanSuzuki was unable to take part in the event for health reasons. We wish him a speedy recovery and hope to see him again next year, when we will come up with something special for the SimRacing celebrities.
Ice cream instead of cake
As a special highlight, we prepared soft ice cream for our guests. I just wanted to have a professional soft ice cream machine like this because ice cream is part of a summer party. Easier said than done, there was no such machine to hire in the area so we were forced to buy our own machine, which turned out to be not so easy. In the end, all went well and we had the soft ice cream machine collected from a catering specialist in Bavaria by a haulage company. A week before the summer party, the ice cream machine was of course extensively tested to ensure that everything would run smoothly at the summer party.
Cake was unfortunately not so popular this year, but probably also due to the temperatures and the soft ice cream available, so we will probably only order one tray of cake from the baker next year - lemon cheesecake, of course.
Of course there was also music, with our own outdoor sound system we were able to fill the party with sound. The playlist that Kai kindly put together for us was revised the evening before, so there were songs for every taste.
Unfortunately, we were unable to offer a guided tour of the warehouse this year as a lot of goods were delivered shortly before the festival and there was simply no room in the warehouse to give a tour. Let's see if we can do it again next year, because such an insight behind the scenes is certainly interesting for some people.
I was also able to meet more people this year, as we were selling on the outside area and Kornel aka Korny81 was able to manage the sales as independently as possible, so I had to help out from time to time, but I wasn't at the till all the time like last year. So I was able to talk to some of you, answer questions, give advice and talk shop.
The entire Sommerfest team did a great job and I simply can't imagine life without them.
A big thank you to
Isabel, Kai, Sasha, Francesca, Milena, Matthias, Marc, Maresa, Mateo, Kornel, Stephan, Janina, Viktor,
I simply have to express the biggest thanks to my wife, the organization, the preparatory work, the meticulous documentation, the foresight for every little detail, the decorations and so much more. THANK YOU for doing all this and for being so indispensable here.
Thank you very much for your visit, see you next time
Best regards
Dennis "Densu" Surace
Business owner SimRaceShop e. K.