Season Fees & Prizes

To fully participate in the Grid Motorsports season championships, every driver is encouraged to donate to a league fund. The money in the fund is used primarily to purchase prizes awarded each season.  The prizes will be awarded according to a raffle/lottery system.

Please note: this is entirely voluntary.  If you don't want to donate to the league, you don't have to.  We're calling it a season 'fee' just for the sake of expediency.  The only caveat is this: only those who donate for a particular season will be eligible for the prize(s) associated with that season.    If you haven't donated for the season (in effect - contributed to the prize fund), then your name won't be included in prize drawing, but you'll otherwise be able to participate in the season completely.

The current policy uses 90% of all donations for prizes, and reserve 10% for accumulating a general league fund that can be applied to larger league infrastructure needs. We don't know what those might be, but considering what we're recommending people donate each season, 10% of that isn't ever going to amount to a whole lot. Over the long term, however, it might allow us to at least partially offset some of the expenses we regularly incur for league operation.

The current suggested donation is $5 per season. Our seasons are generally scheduled to take ~15 weeks.   Thus, if you participate continuously, the 'fees' would amount to ~$17 per year. We think that's pretty reasonable, particularly considering that we're going to turn 90% of all of the money collected into prizes for the league members. The more money we collect, the better prizes we'll award.  It's likely that prizes will be selected from our Grid Motorsports merchandise, but we'll also come up with other gaming or racing-related prizes.

The details of all league collections and expenses will be made available upon request.

To pay for just a single season, use the 'Donate' button above and make a single $5 payment (please use the 'note' field on the resulting PayPal page to indicate that you're paying for a single season). Alternatively, as a convenience, we've provided a means of subscribing to automatically recurring payments of $5 every 15 weeks. If you wish to subscribe to that, just click the 'Subscribe' button and follow the instructions (note - you need a PayPal account for the subscriptions, but not for the one-time payments).  You're encouraged  to include your shipping address when you make a payment (or subscribe) as it makes for a convenient way to ensure we have the correct address when it comes time to ship prizes to their respective winners.

Lastly, if you're subscribed to the automatic season payments and wish to unsubscribe, just use the 'Unsubscribe ' button and follow the instructions.

How are prizes awarded?

Since winning and being successful in the league championships is its own reward, we've opted to use a typical lottery type algorithm to award prizes, rather than giving out prizes to the seasonal champions.  This gives everyone an opportunity to participate in the prize system, and to have a reasonable expectation of (eventually) winning a prize.  The lottery algorithm is as follows:

• Every driver who contributes the season 'fee' ($5 or more) is entered into the seasonal drawing, and is given 15 lottery points.

• For every league event in which a driver participates (even partially), they are awarded an additional lottery point.  Note that 'participation' consists of completing at least one of the races in an event (any of the sprints or the feature race).  For events using the teaching format, participation will be probably be registered via our timesheets mechanism.

• At the end of the season, each driver's lottery point total is converted to virtual lottery tickets in that driver's name, and a drawing is conducted to select one or more prize winners (the budget dictates the number and value of the prizes).

• Note that the drawing (and lottery point accounting) will be managed by a member of the admin team who is not eligible to win.  Other admin members are eligible, assuming they've paid the entry fee.

• Thus - every driver who contributes to the prize fund starts out with an identical chance of winning a prize.  Each driver can increase their chances (or prevent their chances from decreasing, depending on your perspective) by attending league events throughout the season.

• Winners will be announced after the last event of the season, and a concerted effort will be made to ship prizes to the winners within 2 weeks.