This is hypothetical -
You are in a position to flick work for one year.
You want to join the PWA tour for one year.
No sponsors. No primary income.
How much cash would one need?
$35K
my parents can just travel Oz by caravan on $25K per year, so I have estimated extra travel and of course accom in motels etc would be a bit more than caravan parks
pretty rough guess hahahaa
Email Stoney or Scotty?
I'm pretty sure there is an American guy in his 50's or something that did this recently.
Or I could be wrong.
The hardest part would be lugging all that gear through the airports....thats where you could lose alot of money!
I think it really depends on what events you choose to do as some are fairly cost effective to attend and others are not.
The Canary Islands are easily accessible from mainland Europe for a little as $200 flights each way if you are lucky and a lot of European airlines take gear very cheap or even free if you are lucky. Intra-island flights are easy again. So you can do 3 canary events for under $2,000 I reckon if you stay somewhere very cheap.
Random events like Korea and Cabe Verde are difficult. Flights will set you back $2,500 and you could end up going to Korea and having no wind like last year!
Sylt and Austria (for the slalom etc) are easily accessible by car in Europe or cheap intra-europe flights and the accomodation at these places is not too bad.
I think a conservative estimate would be to have AUD$2,000 an event if you are already in Europe, but then the problem becomes what do you do in BETWEEN events for training etc? Europe is not really a cheap place to live with our exchange rate.
I think if I wanted to do a full PWA season on the slalom tour I'd pick the Canaries, Sylt and Austria as the events I'd do and put away $10,000 to do it. However, if you really want to win you'd then need to spend $10,000 on gear ... :-/
The PWA is not a cheap world to race in. The formula tour is much easier; events in cheaper, more accessible locations and the prizemoney is not that far under PWA.
Also remember you'll need another $1,000 just for entry fees for these events ... :-/
Actually no.
PWA Wave Events require a wild card entry for new people. I'm not entirely sure how that works but there would be some qualification events that allow for this.
For slalom you have to get on to the mailing list and then they will decide if you can compete based on previous results and the number of people entered in that event (ie, if there's room). You also have to race on the current or last season's gear. No old equipment ...
Entry fees are relatively nominal. I don't know what they are in 2009 but we only payed AUD$140 an event in previous seasons' compared to AUD$300 for formula events or AUD$400 for an RSX Worlds.
