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Every successful business had a founder who had both the
vision and knew the vital components necessary to the continuing
success of his business.
Hopefully at some point the business founder would become
successful enough to need additional management staff, accounting
and marketing people. You would hire those people to provide
new and fresh ideas to grow your core business, not change
the direction of the business as they lacked the experience
and the knowledge to make informed decisions in that area.
Let me give you an example. Suppose you had been producing
shows for the Rolling Stones in North America for years but
wanted to try and further maximize your return on investment.
You MIGHT hire outside financial people to look at how you
were doing things and make recommendations. You might also
go outside the music world and hire some new promotional people
and look at the fresh ideas they might suggest.
But if the changes they suggested were, the Stones played
too loud and the concerts lasted to long, obviously you would
realize your outside advisors didn’t know anything about
the music business and more importantly why people were willing
to pay good money to see the Rolling Stones.
The ongoing popularity of NHRA national events is primarily
because of the Nitro cars, particularly the Nitro Funny cars
as every poll ever conducted has indicated going back well
over thirty years.
It would seem reasonable SOMEONE should know not to put a
chicane at mid-track and the three cornerstones of the Nitro
FCs popularity was and is:
1----The noise and thunder of high percentage
nitro motors
2----The ability to identify the makes of
the bodies
3---- The performance
Two of the three vital parts are gone and the third (performance)
is locked at the current level with most of the cars running
the same. Whoever made the decision, while explaining the
new rules, to talk about “spec” nitro motors should
have been fired and escorted from the building because that
is nothing short of blasphemy.
Under the current rules
you will not see a dominant Nitro FC team again as NHRA has
micro-managed the rules to dumb down the class where they will
all run the same and the highly funded multi-car teams will
just take turns winning a race or two. If you are a die-cast
fan, or one who roots for the cutest driver, I’m sure
you are ok with this.
This approach has seemingly worked for NASCAR as their fan
base is huge, a mile wide but only an inch deep. The drag
racing fan base is the opposite, with fewer numbers but with
a strong emotional attachment to nitro racing, in some instances
going back thirty or forty years.
The $64,000 question is, can NHRA gain enough new fans to
quickly replace the more traditional fans who are completely
turned off by the current state of affairs in nitro racing
and are finding somewhere else to spend their entertainment
dollars. Fortunately it seems new venues to get your nitro
fix are appearing every day and shows no sign of slowing and
if the end result of all this is more drag racing fans taken
as a whole, then that’s a good thing.
This is the end of my series on Nitro Funny cars as next
month the subject will be racing sponsorships (I hate the
word “sponsor” as that sounds like philanthropy
when in actuality it is a marketing partnership).
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