Win on Sunday, sell on Monday? 4/21/05
I can remember back to the mid-60s when the titans of Detroit had a very large commitment to NHRA doorslammer racing. From totally factory backed Funny Car teams to Super Stock teams to the Factory Experimental classes, those in charge at GM, Ford and Mopar made a serious investment in terms of money, talent and resources in the sport of Drag Racing, and the fact was they were much more involved with drag racing than NASCAR at the time. I’m of the opinion that Detroit believed their involvement in racing was justified by the "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" philosophy. In those days you could go the drag races and watch your hero race a car that actually could be ordered from the local car dealership or in some cases bought race ready right off of the showroom floor. Sadly, those days are long past, at least under the current racing format of the major drag racing sanctioning bodies. The only exception is the Mustang-based regional series. I doubt that very many fans are influenced by an NHRA or IHRA Pro Stocker or Funny Car when it comes to deciding what their next new car purchase will be. Currently, GM, Chrysler and Ford all support NHRA professional teams in either the Pro Stock or Funny Car division with some branding in the form of company logos in Top Fuel, but I’d bet that the big three’s actual investment is much less than it was, say, 40 years ago if you compare 1965 dollars to 2005 dollars. I’m thinking the Detroit companies who are still actively involved in professional drag racing might be doing so from habit, hope and as an engineering exercise. The fact that GM lost 1.1 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2005 and both Ford and Chrysler sales and profits have slumped indicates that people just aren’t buying enough new cars. (There are other factors related to labor that account for some of GM’s woes, but if they sold enough cars it wouldn’t be as big a factor.) The only obvious involvement FoMoCo has in drag racing is supplying
John Force’s team with Mustang race car bodies that, unfortunately,
don’t resemble any Mustang I have ever seen. And when Ford
wanted to use drag racing to develop a new engine for production
cars, all the NHRA did was ban it. (Boy, you talk about pissing
on a sponsor’s shoes!) Now, I don’t want to imply here that there is no value in a major car manufacturer being involved with drag racing major sanctioning bodies. My friend Fred Simmonds, who’s in charge of the GM’s drag racing program, has told me repeatedly that GM remains involved with NHRA and to a lesser degree IHRA drag racing because they see a benefit in the form of increased new car sales as a result. However, I don’t see Ford or Chrysler putting new cars on the Midway at every NHRA event like GM does, so I have to wonder if those two companies just don’t think it is worth the effort. Surely Ford isn’t selling all of the Mustangs they can build. And you’d think Chrysler wouldn’t mind selling a few more Stratuses (Strati?). So, here is the point of this particular rant. It’s time for NHRA and IHRA to do something positive for their Detroit marketing partners. They need a showcase class for the actual cars that Detroit is making. There is a striking resemblance between the automotive scene of 1966 and that of 2005. Back in ’66, when the length of my belt was less than the length of my pant’s leg, horsepower was king. In my hometown of Amarillo, Texas, the Ford, Chevy and Chrysler dealerships all had "house" Super Stock or A/FX cars that competed every Sunday at Amarillo Dragway during the summer. Guys like Fenner Tubbs in a Mopar, Jack Moss in a Galaxie 500XL and Dickie Harrell in a Z-11 raced each other and the fans went to the dealerships on Monday and bought a car like their hero’s. I bought a 1963 Galaxie 500XL, four-speed with a 406 big block under the hood. The point is that back then, just as they are now, Detroit used performance to sell cars and market their brands. Today you can’t watch a car show on television, read a car mag or watch a commercial about cars that doesn’t use horsepower as a sales tool. . .from Mustangs and Dodge Magnums to the BMW and Mercedes Benz, performance and horsepower are the driving force for sales. Virtually every manufacturer has engine options that deliver close to 300 hp and some even have powerplants that deliver 400 hp or more. So, the questions on my mind are: Why haven’t the NHRA or the IHRA marketing brass picked up on this? Maybe they just aren’t car guys, I don’t know. Why aren’t the sanctioning bodies taking advantage of the horsepower wars by developing a premier class for all brand’s high performance cars? And while they’re at it, they could finally come into the 21st century and bring both domestic and so-called foreign manufacturers (most of whom have factories here in the good, old US of A) to the party. A party where the 18- to 35-year-old car enthusiasts could watch a hero driver racing his favorite brand of car against the one he hates in cars that could actually be ordered from the dealer. It would be the perfect opportunity for drag racing to get off their jingoistic butts and allow all brands to compete against each other. I’d pay to watch real factory hot rods with no wheelie bars and flat hoods go at it, and I think most of the younger car-buying fans would too. You want to get the factories and their budgets really seriously involved in drag racing like they are in NASCAR? Give them a venue and a program with cars that they and their customers can really relate to -- and I’m here to tell you that Pro Stock cars with 500-inch big blocks, bubble hood scoops and carburetors under the hood isn’t it. If drag racing’s major sanctioning bodies don’t do
something to help Detroit justify their investment soon, those car
manufacturers' CFO’s -- who are trying to explain billion-dollar
deficits to shareholders who have no emotional attachment to the
sport and can’t see where it is positively affecting their
bottom line -- could end their involvement in drag racing.
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think that a case could be made that without the financial and technical
support of the big three Detroit auto makers, most drag racing sanctioning
bodies (and more specifically the NHRA) could not have survived,
much less thrived over the past 40 years or so. 
