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 ...
