When the project began, some initial goals were set as part of a five-year business plan. A plan which would allow the news service to exist without any outside financial support. One of the premises of that goal was to acquire 40 tracks as part of the news service.
On Thursday, April 6th, 2000 the first of three important goals was reached with the addition of Kopellah Speedway located neat St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. "I made a trip to western Wisconsin to meet with Dale Spychall and Marguerite Lindblom to see about adding their quarter-mile clay oval to our service. They are new track operators looking for ways to increase attendance and car counts and they felt that this news service was one possible way to do that. I left with an agreement from them to join the service and they became the 40th track to join us", stated Jeffrey Sachse founder of Racing Online.
"That 40 track goal was something I had in mind since the beginning and it's taken just over four years to reach that mark. The focus of the new customers I acquire will turn away from the tracks a bit. We'll still add tracks when we can but now it's time to work on projects that can keep Racing Online going during the off-season", noted Sachse.
Racing Online is approaching the one-million log on point to the main news page of it's service, which is another goal of sorts. "The million mark was another goal established at the beginning of the project. That number reflects only the hits to the main page, as we've already had "millions" of hits throughout the service, but that's an individual page. It's out front door sort of speak," noted Sachse.
Technically the million mark on a page was already reached though the "Fan Forums", which has seen 1.3 million hits since July 15, 1999. The forums have also seen over 10,000 postings during that period.
"Those numbers are impressive, but hits have a tendency to exaggerate the actual number of people. We've actually got in the range of 20,000 - 30,000 regular readers if you go by logged I.P addresses. That's still a very significant number when you consider most of our online readership comes from a smaller area here in the upper Midwest," claimed Sachse.
While Racing Online has already achieved some of it's long term goals Sachse believes it's still just the beginning. "I don't think ROL has peaked as a service by any means. There are still many features I'd like to add, but it really all comes down to the financial firepower at my disposal and the time available. I can say one thing for certain, by reaching some important goals this year I can tell you we're here to stay", concluded Sachse.