Just a quick reminder we will not be holding a Teutonic Tuesday Event in either November or December because of the Holiday Party on December 2^nd and the Christmas Holiday in December.

We look forward to 2023 as we have many more events in the works.

From all of us to your families, have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

This has been a difficult time for all of us. As a Board we have a desire to hold an event for our members that is safe. This is not easy to do. Yes, we can require masks and social distancing but these rules are difficult to enforce.

We have viewed photos of other events where attendees are not waring masks and not social distancing and we don’t want to be placed in the position of being the enforcement police!

So we have developed an idea which we hope you will embrace.

We are considering a Sunshine Bimmers digital calendar for 2021 which we hope will be a much better year. 

We are requesting you send us a photo of your car . . . don’t worry if your car is not show quality car or a beater our intention is to have 13 cars for months one for each month and then a collage of as many other cars submitted included on the back cover.

Our being able to accomplish this is completely dependent on you our members co-operation.  We need YOU to submit a high-resolution photo of your car. 

In addition, if you have a unique license plate please submit a separate photo of that as well.

We are short on time so please submit your photo’s no later than November 16^th. 

You can submit your submission to Robert Ziegler at robertziegler@msn.com

I hope all of our members enjoyed a great Holiday season. I wanted to start the year with a brief update on where we are as a BMW CCA Chapter for 2020. 

In November BMW CCA held a meeting of all the Chapter Presidents and Treasures in Dallas Texas. At this meeting, many items for the future of the club as a whole were discussed that will have a profound effect on Chapter operations for the coming years. 

The most monumental change will be the significant loss of chapter revenue paid by National to the chapters. We will lose about 45% of our income from National over last year’s amount. National justifies this by not requiring the chapters to issue quarterly newsletters to our members. Please believe me when I tell you that our newsletters did not cost us anywhere near 45% of our income from National. Instead, you will be receiving twice a year a new regional magazine with content solely supplied by the regional chapters. The name will be Bimmerlife!  

This was done because the club BMW CCA has a net loss of over $800,000 in the last year. The largest part of that loss was caused by the club magazine Roundel. Like many other magazines add revenue for the Roundel has plummeted. National has decided to try to offset that loss partly by way of reducing the monthly stipends to the chapters. As a result, your board has been forced to consider how we move forward in the best interest of our members and to give you our members the best experience we can for 2020. Number one on that list starting an Auto Cross program. Presently we are working with the venue and the Porsche club to “piggyback” on their successful events. This is only until we decide if this is a viable option for our members. If we do decide to move forward as Sunshine Bimmers Auto Cross we will have to incur the expense of purchasing our own timing equipment and computer to run our events.  Next, we decided to push the 2019 Holiday Party to January 2020.

You should have seen the posting on our Sunshine Bimmers Facebook page and Websites with details. You will be receiving an email invitation shortly. We decide to do this for two reasons. We wanted to wait until after the November meeting to be aware of just how much of our monthly revenue we were going to lose. (we never even considered that it would be that high) The second reason was that this year there was a very short window to host a party because there were only three weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  

That said the board and I will work hard to make 2020 a banner year for our members. I would like to hear from you our members with suggestions on what you would like. You can email me at robertziegler@msn.com with your ideas. I know I speak for your entire Sunshine Board in Wishing you all the best for 2020! Bob Ziegler, Sunshine Bimmers President 

Remember it is not about the cars it is about the people

Edgar Lee will be 49 years old this month and was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is married and has two daughters, two dogs, and a rabbit. Edgar is a Service Programs Marketing Specialist at Siemens Energy. He has been a Sunshine Bimmers member since 2018.  

When asked which was his first BMW, Edgar gave us a nice story: “Trick answer, in a manner of speaking–the BMW that gave me the bug is actually one I never got to drive (I wasn’t old enough…), and that was a 1972 Fjordblau E3 Bavaria (3.0 L with dual Weber carbs that I can still hear in my mind) that my parents bought in 1976, and sold as a “ran when parked” car in 1985. Then truly got bit by a 1987 E30 325i that I spent a good portion of the summer of 1989 driving, followed 8 years later by a test drive of a 1988 E28 M5 that a close friend was restoring to her original beauty and ran like a bat out of hell even though it had a bad 3rd gear synchronizer.” 

Edgar currently owns a 2001 E46 330Ci Convertible and a 2009 E70 X5 3.0. Some of his hobbies other than wrenching on his cars include camping with the family and cooking which he enjoys. His personal motto: “Never memorize something you can look up.”- Albert Einstein

Want to be our member of the month? 

Email us at sunshinebimmers@gmail.com and we will contact you with further details.

BMWCCA Sunshine Bimmers / Space Coast PCA Team up!

Sunshine Bimmers has been hard at work finding ways to bring Autocross events to its members. We have finally been able to solidify collaboration with the Space Coast Porsche Club of America and the great people at The American Muscle Car Museum.

Last month our Social Chair Esteban was invited to participate in the last event of Space Coast PCA’s 2019 season. It was a great event and it demonstrated this will be a successful collaboration.

Please review the Rules and Safety details outlined in the PDF below:
https://spc.pca.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Space-Coast-Autocross-Rules-and-Procedures-2020-R3.pdf

See below a video and a couple pictures of the October event.

 If you have participated in Autocross events previously and would like to participate in one of our upcoming events please send an email to esteban.valentin@gmail.com requesting to be added to the list of potential participants. Esteban will be coordinating the details and assembling a list of members interested in joining these events.

Email us at sunshinebimmers@gmail.com and we will contact you with further details.