Cars and motorcycles from a variety of makes and models gathered on Kennesaw State’s Marietta campus on Saturday, June 14, to benefit the university’s motorsports team.
The KSU Motorsports team, which is a part of the Society of Automotive Engineers, hosted its inaugural Collective Dynamic Motorsports Show, displaying a variety of American muscle, imported and exotic automobiles.
Entry was free for KSU students and $3 for non-students with all the proceeds going to KSU Motorsports.
Marcelo Chirinos, a member of the business team at KSU Motorsports, and Madeleine Rondeau, the business lead and forthcoming VP of the motorsports team, both contributed to the creation of the show.
Through delegating the large amount of preparation work for the show, they were able to better accomplish the task of creating it from scratch.
“I thought it would be a good idea to get more attention for the motorsports team,” Chirinos said. “Basically [we wanted to] start a new source of revenue for the team and it also sounded like fun.”
Rondeau said that the idea for the show originated out of hosting a car reveal for the team and transformed into a show to promote the KSU Motorsports team as a whole.
“We learned a lot about event management in the process,” Chirinos said. “There were so many details we had to cover.”
“It was difficult because we didn’t know who was going to be there and what we needed at the event,” Rondeau said. “We kind of just threw it all together.”
Chirinos stated that the most challenging aspect of setting the show up was to avoid creating a standard car show.
He cited other shows he had been to, such as the popular Caffeine and Octane event at Perimeter Mall that draws around 2,000 cars each month, as a benchmark of where the team’s ambitions for the show were at.
Additionally, Chirinos is working on bringing more interactive games and activities to the show to set Collective Dynamic apart from more traditional car shows.
“We are working with the university to get them on board to make [Collective Dynamic] a monthly thing,” Chirinos said. “Ideally, it would be a central source of funding for the team.”
“I was disappointed in the attendance, but we had a lot of cool cars out there,” Rondeau said. “People definitely will remember that and we will be able to grow from here. We can make small adjustments to the time and pay more attention to smaller details that go on the day of.”
The networking benefits of the show can also prove to be valuable to the KSU Motorsports team. Chirinos stated that finding potential investors, job opportunities and sponsors for the team is important to the team and the show also serves to benefit the university by showing off what the engineering program can produce.
“If the show starts to work out in our favor, a lot of the money will go to buying parts to make it to comp[etition],” Rondeau said.
Rondeau and Chirinos had also proposed shop tours to give a more in-depth look at KSU Motorsports and the engineering program as a whole.
Chirinos and Rondeau said that they are working on analyzing their tactics used in creating the inaugural show to better improve upon their next one, with a focus on the promotion of the show and the management of the day-of operations.
The next event for the KSU Motorsports takes place on Saturday, July 20.
