NEWS & ANALYSIS
A Window of Opportunity?
Words by Will Hanna
7/19/06
The DRO Op/Ed editor has been wondering why the National Hot Rod Association or Bruton Smith’s SMI corporation hasn’t (or perhaps they have?) made an offer to Bill Bader, Sr. for his shares of the IHRA and the two seats on their board of directors. Interestingly, DRO columnist Will Hanna has also been thinking along the same lines. His observations make sense to us so we’ve decided to print his thoughts on our News and Analysis page.
Sometimes in life you have to take advantage of those windows of opportunity that open up for you. The NHRA's apparent shortsightedness may open the door for IHRA to take a major jump in marketshare....
So NHRA wants to jump all over IHRA's schedule. Never mind if Evan Knoll is in the process of buying a share of IHRA. [Ed Note: DRO sources have confirmed that Bill Bader has been shopping his 25-percent share of the IHRA around for some time and the asking price has varied from $2,000,000 to just over a million. Our same sources say that $1.5 million was the original price to Evan Knoll.] It's a fact Knoll has a lot of money invested over there, namely the new Nitro FC program. Oh yeah, he has a lot of sponsor dollars invested in prominent NHRA teams. The NHRA already ticked him off once last year.
So, here's a scenario that may not be too far fetched. NHRA announces a new schedule that steps all over IHRA's schedule. Evan's purchase of IHRA goes through. Here's where the window opens. Evan has enough of NHRA's BS and moves all of his sponsored teams to IHRA. Let's see, that's Melanie, JR Todd, Ashley, among others. Then he pulls his associate dollars from NHRA events and raises the payouts on the IHRA side. That's not the big window. Enter Bruton Smith. With the rest of IHRA reportedly for sale, Bruton comes in along with Bristol, LVMS and Sonoma. Fontana gets upgraded to national event standards. Those two parties pooling their resources could just pull off a change to put IHRA on even standing, if not higher standing than NHRA.
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Obviously, that's a worst case scenario for NHRA. It's going to tick Evan off. Maybe NHRA never heard that saying about the gift horse. As things stand, with two peacefully coexisting sanctioning bodies, NHRA will always be the big dog and IHRA will always play second fiddle. The reported move to step on IHRA’s schedule just stinks. It makes a lot of people angry. Looking at the long run, I think the NHRA stands to gain from an IHRA FC program. A low buck team could develop over there and eventually jump into NHRA (for example, Doug Foley).
I don't think it's as far fetched as it sounds, but it definitely sets the stage for a potential perfect storm.
One could argue either way whether that would be good or bad for the sport. I'd sure hate to see drag racing go through what open wheel racing went through.
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