{"id":25584,"date":"2014-07-07T19:02:48","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T18:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/issue_content\/palmersport-experience\/"},"modified":"2019-07-21T03:29:43","modified_gmt":"2019-07-21T02:29:43","slug":"palmersport-experience","status":"publish","type":"issue_content","link":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/may-2010\/110\/palmersport-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"PalmerSport experience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Driving day numbers are down, but there\u2019s no need to worry<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A company that relies heavily on corporate customers can\u2019t have found the past two years easy. With this in mind, I was keen to ask Jonathan Palmer how PalmerSport has coped with the recession. <\/p>\n<p>Even though Bedford Autodrome is still the place to go for the ultimate driving experience, the profit margins must be tight \u2013 a situation that is surely only exaggerated during a credit crunch. You pay in excess of \u00a3700 to drive six cars, but these you are encouraged to drive to within an inch of their lives. On my two visits here there has never been a problem with any of the cars, which is testament to the behind-the-scenes work that goes into preparing them and indeed the money that is spent. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cBusiness wasn\u2019t down a worrying amount in 2008\/09,\u201d says Palmer. \u201cIt was certainly significantly down, but we were still doing a lot of business at Bedford and it was up on 2003\/04.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>MotorSport Vision, the umbrella company that owns PalmerSport, remains coy about how many people it has had through its doors over the past few years, but it would say it was \u201cup to 20,000 a year\u201d. If each of them is paying \u00a3700, that amounts to \u00a314 million at the peak of business. It\u2019s a hefty sum, but factor in that it has just bought 27 BMW M3s, which it will then modify by lowering and adding a rollcage \u2013 among other improvements \u2013 and the money is soon spent. And that\u2019s not considering the cost of instructors, the food \u2013 which is delicious by the way \u2013 fuel, tyres and any other running costs. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf someone else tried to do what we do, they\u2019d lose shed-loads of money because there\u2019s a lot of expertise involved in giving people the quality and the extent of product at the price we do,\u201d says Palmer. \u201cA lot of that comes from volume, and if we were doing the volumes of our competitors then it wouldn\u2019t stack up. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cAlso, if you took your 911 round here you\u2019d need a set of tyres at the end of the day and it would cost you about \u00a32000 to do it, so I don\u2019t think we\u2019re that expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Although PalmerSport\u2019s numbers have been down, it\u2019s easy to see why there is confidence in the product. \u201cPalmerSport is not an area of business that we\u2019d anticipate growing beyond the levels we had in 2007,\u201d says Palmer. \u201cWe won\u2019t be back there this year, but we probably will next year.\u201d No doubt it will. <\/p>\n<p>In my experience the PalmerSport day at Bedford Autodrome is one of the best overall packages out there. For more information call 01403 733999 or visit www.palmersport.com <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":749,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"tags":[167,229,195,35714,1174],"issue_decade":[121600],"issue_year":[121601],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/25584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue_content"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/749"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/25584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252247,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/25584\/revisions\/252247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25584"},{"taxonomy":"issue_decade","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_decade?post=25584"},{"taxonomy":"issue_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_year?post=25584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}