We’ve been doing these “State of RACE22.com” stories for many years now. Usually it coincides with when the President of the United States delivers the “State of the Union” but this year we had our hands full at that time and we weren’t ready to release this then.

RACE22.com has been busy this off season. We’ve been busy working for you and while you’ve probably noticed that we’ve had less content, the work we’ve been doing is behind the scenes. So I guess to tell you what’s been going on I’ve got to take a trip backwards a little.

RACE22.com’s relaunch in September 2007 set us on a course to become the voice of Late Model Stock Car racing. In September 2007 literally no one was covering Late Model Stock Car racing in the Mid-Atlantic region. There were message boards where people could talk about racing but there was no one hitting the Late Model Stock Car beat.

I’m not a journalist. I founded RACE22.com because I saw a void in the market and a future for the product we could offer to racers, crews and fans alike. While we were new to the game we quickly became a popular destination for the racers to read about events all over.

Over the next few years as we covered just Late Model Stock Car racing, the website exploded. It became the single source for LMSC race coverage from the UARA to the NWAAS tracks all over Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina. We’ve expanded our coverage in recent years to include Limiteds, Super Late Models from PASS to CARS and all other events we could around the country as well as Southern Modified coverage and coverage of Bowman Gray Stadium, which is another animal of its own.

I don’t want to bore you with the details but RACE22.com became a household name. With that came a lot of problems and sometimes success works against you. In this case it has. We tried so hard to continue to the be the site we started out to be which would only publish original content that we produced ourself. That became a taxing project and eventually we had to give in and start posting press releases and working in a different way.

Everything has changed. From live coverage of races which we started on Twitter before it became popular and eventually began using live blog services. Video interviews were great for a long time and now everyone with a phone is doing them. Technology is ever changing and sometimes you get behind on the evolution.

That’s one of the many things that changed over the last three to four years. I also relinquished control of the website day to day and while a good job was done, RACE22.com hasn’t been the same.

We’ve always done things differently. We weren’t journalists in the beginning, we were just race fans who wanted desperately to give other race fans the same things we’d want to see if we were going to a website for content. Grammar and spelling were less important than breaking a story and being on the cutting edge of everything happening in racing. Somewhere along that path, we lost our way.

That’s where this “State of RACE22.com” really begins …. We’re going old school in 2016 because the “State of RACE22.com” had become stale. We’ve been digging like there’s no tomorrow to make RACE22.com as bad ass as it used to be. There’s a reason people became addicted to this website. They never knew what they would read and they knew it’s the kind of content they couldn’t find anywhere else.

This year we’re going to be laying it all out there again. We’re working very hard to make sure we’re as on top of changing technology as we can be whether that’s social media or something we can buy or use. We want to change the game and bring you the best possible coverage, just like we used to do. That might mean that some of the things you know about RACE22.com today might not exist any longer.

We’re revamping the way we do live coverage. We’re going to revamp the way we use social media. We’re going to revamp the way stories have been written over the last few years. We’re going to add new features and more to the website. We’re going back to doing a lot of things the way we used to but we’re also going to bring new elements in and use technology the way it was made to be used. We’re going to be unique and innovative.

If you loved what RACE22.com was when we were exploding and we were everywhere then you’re going to love the RACE22.com that you’re going to see this year. We got stale and we began to fail even though our viewer numbers haven’t waivered.

So the “State of RACE22.com” has never been better. My wife Kimberly has been working overtime rebuilding our advertising base and building new relationships with companies that can benefit greatly from the viewer base that we offer. The mythical character known as Corey Latham is ready to get back to grinding out some of the best stories in racing and Mark Rogers, Jr. will also be bringing his A-game this year as things get back underway on the eastern side of Virginia and North Carolina. And we also have several new members to the team that we will be introducing soon that will be helping to bring you coverage like you expect from RACE22.com.

The old RACE22.com is coming back stronger and better than ever before.