What are the main issues in drag racing today? Spec fuel in T/F? Illegal
devices in bracket racing? TV coverage?
A quick review of the past reveals a long list of hot topics that have
concerned the drag racing world since its inception: Bracket racing. Jet,
airplane, and rocket power. Nitromethane. Nostalgia. The Whipple
supercharger. Female drivers. The definitions of street legal, gasoline, and
stock. Cigarette and beer sponsorship. Entry fee size vs. payout size.
Buybacks. Aerodynamics. Wheelbases. Turbocharged V-6s in Pro Stock. What W.J.
said. What John Force said. Two car teams. Losing racing credentials for
dealing drugs. The high cost of racing. Nitrous Oxide. The success of
NASCAR. Deep staging. Don Garlits.
This is in no way a complete list but it does show that historically, the
drag racing world is beset with issues both of a technological as well as a
sociological nature. With every issue, it seems the health of the sport
hangs in the balance with fans and participants either being drawn to or
disengaged from the sport.
Opposing views on the health of drag racing.
In discussing the overall health of drag racing, people tend to fall towards
two different camps. One side believes that a healthy, powerful, central,
professional sanctioning body (i.e., the NHRA) is needed for the long-term
health of the sport. The other side believes the sport can be healthy (some
say healthier) without it.
Believers in the strong, central, professional sanctioning body ideal point
to other sports as examples. Professional football, baseball, hockey, and
basketball all have evolved to one central sanctioning body for each sport.
When secondary sanctioning bodies have been formed, they have either been
crushed or absorbed. Most of the folks who believe that the one, central
sanctioning body is the way to go believe that TV is of utmost importance in
drawing people to the sport and that drag racing as an entity is losing
ground due to (the NHRA having) no strong TV package.
There also is some
feeling here that the slipping away of sponsors from the Top Fuel ranks in
the NHRA spells disaster for the entire sport. In short, this line of
thinking is, "As goes the NHRA and Top Fuel, so goes the sport of drag
racing." The focus here is on attracting spectators and the belief is
that the sport can be best grown from the top down.
On the other side of the coin is the thought that a strong, central,
professional sanctioning body doesn't count for much. Using basketball as
an illustration shows that for every player under the jurisdiction of the
NBA, there are conservatively over 3,000 other players at various levels of
organized amateur basketball (college, high school, city league, church
league, intramurals, Gus Macker, etc.) whom the NBA doesn't even touch. It
follows that since it has jurisdiction over less than 3.3 percent of the
organized basketball players in this country, the NBA really doesn't have
much to do with the health of the sport. The same is felt to be true of drag
racing (i.e., that most racers would just continue as they were regardless
of the NHRA).
A quick glance at a current list2 of drag
racing sanctioning bodies shows a growing list of sanctioning bodies and
events designed to appeal to niche groups such as nostalgia vehicles, super
stockers, funny cars, electric cars, Chevys, Fords, Mopars, Macs, imports,
motorcycles, street legal, strictly stock, etc. In short, this camp believes
that the health of drag racing is more dependent on there being a variety of
smaller sanctioning bodies than it is on having one large body. The focus
here is more on attracting participants and the belief is that the sport
best can be grown from the bottom up.
Four Main Issues
Regardless of your stance on the overall health of the sport and how to
achieve it, there are four main issues facing the sport at this time. These
issues are nothing new; they have all been around for a long time. They are,
however, still the main issues which beckon to be resolved before drag
racing can go to the next level.
1. The largest issue is the tension between professionalism and amateurism.
In many ways, the above discussion concerning the health of the sport
involves this very issue. It may be worth a review here of the basic
differences between the professional and the amateur (or sportsman): One
gets paid to do what the other pays to do. One is more work than play; the
other is more play than work. One is inherently commercial, the other,
non-commercial. In professional sports the whole focus is winning (winning
isn't the main thing; it's the only thing). In amateur sports, the focus
is on participating well (it's not whether you win or lose but how you
play the game). One is done for external rewards, the other for internal
rewards.3
It is natural for amateurs to emulate professionals and this causes
professionalism in all its forms to creep down into the amateur ranks. At
what point is this bad? For example, are bracket race purses of upwards to
$1-million a good thing or does that large of an external reward push
bracket racing to something outside of the amateur sport it was conceived to
be? This type of question exists in other sports also (witness the NCAA
Division 1 amateur basketball tournament $1.7-billion, 7-year TV deal) and
drag racing is only one of several sports questioning if over-professionalization
will make their sport needlessly unfriendly to the entry level competitor.
The question really becomes: How can drag racing offer a professional sport
on the one hand, a beginner-friendly sport on the other hand, and a clear,
logical, navigable pathway between the two?
2. The second biggest issue facing drag racing today is the effect of
television on the sport. Does televised drag racing draw people into the
sport? Going back to our NBA basketball example, if a visiting foreigner
with no previous exposure to amateur basketball goes to a high school
basketball game due to his enthusiasm for the NBA games he has seen
televised, he sees pretty much the same game as he sees on TV albeit at a
different skill level. If on the other hand someone goes to a local drag
race due to TV exposure, it is not the same game. It is bracket racing. For
the average fan, it is a huge disappointment. Will they ever return?
In an entirely different way, TV puts another tremendous burden on the local
strip. Do this experiment on yourself: Go see something live for the first
time that you've watched multiple times before on TV. Keep mental notes of
where the live experience disappoints you and where it is superior to the
televised event. I have done this numerous times going to different events
including the Detroit Grand Prix C.A.R.T. race, an NFL game, and the circus.
In every case, I was in many ways disappointed with the live event.
Paul
McCartney talked about this in an interview on HBO(?) a few years ago. He
talked about how much more difficult is was to do a spectacular live show
since MTV, VH1, and the proliferation of cable TV had heightened the
expectations of the crowd. McCartney claimed that due to TV, the light shows
that once had enthralled the crowds now were considered quite mundane and
that greater and greater special effects were needed to put on what would be
perceived as a high-quality show. In only a slightly different vein, the
whole special effects phenomena leads to unrealistic expectations in
general.
Last night, I attended Mission Impossible 2 with my wife. While we
were there watching spectacularly choreographed (i.e., fake) fist fighting
on the silver screen, our son was down at the local ice cream parlor and
witnessed a real live street fight. As you can imagine, it bore no
resemblance to what we had seen at the Movie Theater and left him feeling
like what he saw never really got going.
The disparity between TV and the live experience may not be as great with
drag racing, however, due to its poor conversion to TV. I had a car-geek
friend4 who owned about sixteen T-120 videotapes of top
fuel dragster and funny car drag racing but had never been to a live race. I
convinced him to go to the Popular Hot Rodding Nationals with us one year
(1984?). When we got out of the car in the parking lot, a top fuel motor was
being revved up about 200 yards away. He asked, "What's that loud
noise?" I told him it was a top fuel dragster or funny car. He replied,
"No, I hear the cars running. What I'm talking about is that
REAL loud noise!" (Oh, of course we didn't rip on him for THAT all
day long!) The point is that people don't understand fuel racing from TV
and therefore TV is most assuredly not the reason they attend professional
races.
Great changes would have to be made for drag racing to be exciting on TV.
Some examples of how TV has changed other sports are: Yellow balls in
tennis, the entire tournament structure of golf, the lower pitching mound,
the reduced strike zone and loss of flannel uniforms in baseball, the shot
clock and TV time outs in basketball, and the two-minute warning and the
changed definition of offensive holding in football.5
Some sports have purposely stayed away from huge TV packages so they
wouldn't have to make the changes. Track & Field is a good example as
there is every reason to believe that a large TV package would ruin that
sport.6
How much change should professional drag racing be willing to undergo to
fit into the demands of TV?
And what would the effect of a great TV menu of drag racing have on the
attendance of the local track? Because people will often choose to not come
out to the live event if they have a chance to watch it on TV, professional
stick-and-ball sports keep television out of their local markets if their
games are not selling out. Consider this: In 1949, before major league
baseball games were nationally televised, annual attendance at minor league
games was at 42 million. After only 8 years of the big leagues being on TV,
minor league attendance fell to 15 million.7
Would that kind of diversion away from the local tracks be good for the
sport of drag racing?
What about TV money? There is no surer way to increase the expense of
participating in a sport than to put it on TV. Of the few hundred thousand
drag racers out there over the years, how long is the list of names of those
who have financially benefited from the sport being on TV? Compare that list
to the list of those who had to throw more money at their racing program as
the result of TV. Is chasing the dream of huge TV dollars a worthy goal? The
answer may be found in the experience of the Olympics. The cost to compete
for those folks has gone up astronomically since the TV money has crept in
and the resultant bureaucracy and graft is nothing to smile about either.
Lastly on the TV issue, who will watch it anyway? Question: Who watches golf
on TV? Answer: Golfers! No non-golfer has ever decided to attend a live golf
match because it looks so great on TV nor have they taken up the game due to
the TV exposure it enjoys. The people who watch golf are golfers! The people
who watch drag racing are drag racers, street racers, or at the very least
high performance car buffs. The belief that you can fill the stands by
gaining TV exposure needs to be looked at much more closely than on the
surface. TV has its place but how can it be harnessed for the good of
drag racing?
3. The third biggest issue in drag racing today is: Who gets the $? If it's
true that the sport is so expensive as to dissuade many of the occasional
winners from continuing, where is the new talent (i.e., those with little
chance of being in the money) going to come from? Do the math. If 48 cars
show up at a typical race for a 16 car field, that means that for every car
that makes the field, there's two that paid the expense of getting to the
track, lodging, etc., and didn't even get the privilege to race. Of the
remaining 16, in many cases, only a few will be in the money. Add it all up
and you only have a small percentage taking any money home against their
expenses.
If money truly can win races, how much sense does it make to give
the winner (allegedly already the guy with the most money) the bulk of the
prize money? As long as the cash rewards for winning are high, and the
result for losing is zero reimbursement, the cost of competition will be out
of reach for all but the handful of people at the top. The contingency
awards only add to this problem because they only go to the winner and
runner up. To avoid their own version of this problem, every successful
stick-and-ball league has revenue sharing that does not leave the little guy
sucking wind.
4. Fourth and closely related to the prior point, is the issue of ownership
of the sanctioning body. Question: What's the biggest difference between
the stick-and- ball sports and drag racing? Answer: The biggest difference
is that in the stick-and-ball sports, the teams own the league! This is the
big key to the participants making reasonable money. Do you think that if
the NBA was a separate entity and each team was coming to them for sanction
that pro basketball would be the financial success it is? No way! Each NFL
team, each NBA team, each NHL team, all owns an equal share of their
respective league! Even the youth soccer league we have here where I live
(and I'm sure where you live as well) is owned by whom? The parents of the
players!8
Motor sports is one of the few remaining sports
which has separate entities running the sport and participating in the
sport. NASCAR is often held up as a working model for this type of thing.
Yes, it does seem to be working now but I predict that in the end, it will
be NASCAR's undoing. The only way to continue the long term viability of a
sports program, is to allow those with a large investment in the game (the
teams) to have a voice and/or vote in policy AND a piece of the financial
pie!
Where Are the Solutions?
Anybody can point out issues and problem areas but solutions are a little
harder to come by. In most fields, when good ideas stop coming from inside
the industry, they come in from the outside. Some industries have been so
dead that all real innovation has come from outside. The cool part about
drag racing is that there are a lot of ideas being not only exchanged but
also actually tried out right now. But the sport still needs more ideas.
Yours and mine. And we need to stop saying, "That will never work"
and replace it with, "If you can get the resources to try it, go for
it!" or even, "I'll help in any way I can." It's an
exciting time.
Next month, I will briefly discuss an area I see very little written about
but one ripe with competitive opportunity: the elimination ladder. It's
amazing to what extent it effects all of the issues discussed above.
As always, I value your input whether it be suggestion, comment, or
criticism.
Thanks for reading.
Doug Dornbos
e-mail:
