Some good stuff already in this thread.
At our local club (Chippenham -
www.cmcc.org.uk) we happen to have a lot of juniors coming in to the club at the moment. We must be doing something right, and it is things that all clubs should be doing.
- We have a club car (Tamiya TT-01) that has a junior using it most weeks, and a few of those juniors have gone on to buy their own cars
- We don't go around telling people they need the best of everything to compete. In fact we mostly suggest a TT-01, Schumacher Mi1 or Tamiya Mini for people to get started with.
- We suggest the £10 Saturn 20 motor for newcomers to touring and it is also our spec motor in Minis - on our small club track, the Saturn 20 is barely any slower than the 13.5 "blinky" cars, so the low-budget racers don't get the impression that they need to upgrade to the fastest of everything to compete
- We have just been at the South West Model Show where we put on a racing demonstration (which usually gets a few spectators). This year some club members donated their old Minis for "Have-a-go" sessions which had a HUGE amount of interest, mostly from younger drivers, I'll wager there were 40 or 50 people having a go on the Sunday.
- We have the support of a local shop (MMR) who are trackside most weeks.
- The more juniors we get, the more word-of-mouth they spread - quite a few of them have brought their friends along, and then their friends have started racing as well. We also have a few father-and-son racers. Mothers and daughters are also welcome!
It may seem like hard work for clubs to attract members, and it may seem like there are no rewards at times, but basically you need to keep plugging away.
- Keep a cheap/simple class of racing on the rulebook. Avoid elitism.
- Have a club car at the track every week. I've seen club cars mysteriously become "personal" cars after they haven't been used for a while - don't let that happen.
- Promote the club. Get on the web, get posters in the shops, get out to the local shows, get in the press. If people don't know about you, they will never come.
If anything it is easier to encourage new racers in off-road right now. There are a lot more electric off-roaders available for reasonable money, and a lot of the intimidatingly expensive "pit-bling" that you would see at a TC meeting is unnecessary. A new racer with a B4.1 RTR or a short-course RTR is only a set of tyres and springs away from having a car quick enough for the sharp-end of the club A-final (actually that is more or less the case with on-road too, but it doesn't look like that when everyone is running tyre warmers and has their laptop on the table).
It's tough to sell RC to a generation that is used to computer games. RC is much harder to master, but the satisfaction of doing well is so much greater. It's a real-life hobby, only constrained by your own talents, not by the programmer's code.