January 2026 President’s Message
Dear GGR Members,
Happy New Year everyone! We just had our first Board meeting of the year, so I wanted to thank all of the new Board Members for joining the team. But more importantly I wanted to thank the outgoing Board Members for all of their years of service to the Club. The first meeting is where all the Directors present their respective plans, schedules, and budgets for the year. I’m excited that GGR will have another year of exciting events to serve the diverse interests of our members. So if there is some event that you would like to have us put on, or you would like to put on an event, please email me with your idea.
On a personal note, I realized that sometimes we end up living parallel lives other people. Let me explain - I joined PCA in 1999 when I was just a kid. Ok, I was 28, but I probably looked 18. Then in 2000, I became The Nugget Editor. At the time, our Competition Director was a guy named Jeff Sykes. One thing that Jeff did that made an impression on me is that he was one of the first people to pre-order the “brand new” 996 and he had the foresight to get a custom license plate from the DMV that just said “996”, I thought that was pretty cool. He was a high powered attorney and an enthusiastic track and time trial driver. One day, we had met up for lunch since we both worked in the Financial District. I remember going to his office in the Russ Building on Montgomery. His law firm was huge and they had occupied many floors of the Russ Building for decades, the firm and the building were synonymous with each other. Over the course of lunch, we were talking about cars and the Club. Then he mentioned that he had been spending more and more time on his boat in his free time. Sometimes he would do his work on the boat so he could focus without anybody bothering him.
So nearly 25 years later, I started noting some patterns about my life. After autocrossing for 20 years, I had started doing track and time trial events. One of my track cars was a 996. In 2022-3, I was the Track Director for GGR (as the Competition Director position had been eliminated). Then towards the end of the Pandemic, the architecture firm I work for moved to the Russ Building on Montgomery! A couple years ago, I started taking sailing lessons and have been sailing and racing pretty avidly. Finally, I am in the process of buying a boat! For you sailors out there, it’s a Farr 40 One Design race boat (I will need a big crew to sail this thing, so email me if you want in). So I just wanted to share some of the parallels that Jeff and I had in common!
Looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming event!
Sincerely,
Howard Yao
president@pca-ggr.org
