Will The NHRA Fade Away?
By Glen Grissom
Photo by Ian Tocher
5/8/06
ay as well swing for the fences with my first column for DRO, so indulge me. Will NHRA drag racing still be around in 10 years? 15? Do we even care? I hope it will, but don’t think the survival of the series is a sure thing.
For the past 15 years I’ve been primarily writing and editing about the tech and people of circle track racing – from Indy cars to NASCAR to Saturday night racing classes, and also about street car performance. Yet, my first encounter with a racecar was an amateur drag car when I was 8 years old, and it scarred me for life.
I was an Air Force kid, so I lived all over the U.S. but did spend some of my formative youth in the high desert of SoCal in the early to mid ‘60s. So, drag racing was the racing I first heard about or paid any interest to. We also had a neighbor for a short time who had a screaming yellow Dodge 413 he would tune in his driveway on weekdays and then flat-trailer tow to LA on the weekends to race. When that 413 would bellow it would blow the birds from the trees and magnetize all the kids right up to its engine bay. Our moms thought it was the equivalent of a social disease and would tell us to stay away from that “nasty” racecar. Our dads were enviously tolerant, I think. I got to spend time handing tools to the owner/driver and helping with garage rat stuff.
So, that was my first encounter with a straight runner and I never forgot it, or the thrilling chill it could bring when it fired up, or the occasional police car stopping by to tell the guy to button it up for the night. My own son, who has been surrounded by street performance and racecar parts and stuff all his life, isn’t enamored with it. For example, he has on-line video games, and can compete with others from all over the world for an entertainment choice. I kicked a can with my buds in the street.
Even though I’ve been primarily helping racers go roundy-round racing, and followed NASCAR’s growth into the big kahuna of U.S. motorsports, I now get to examine more closely and live with the racing that first grabbed me. Times change, and as Boss Kettering of ACDelco used to say, “The price of progress is trouble, and I don’t think the price is too high.” I guess I’m going to find out.
The NHRA seems to me to be at an equivalent turning point that NASCAR was in the mid-‘80s: get bigger, or stay static and slowly fade away. Don’t think that it can’t happen to a national racing series? For decades Indy car racing was really the premier racing series in the U.S., and continued to be until about the early-‘90s. Today, Indy car racing is essentially irrelevant to all but the most unbelievably die-hard fan and participant – undermined by its internal friction, and ill-advised business and car design decisions that raised car costs so high they had a doubly chilling affect.
First, the quality of the cars to fill the field went south because it took so much money to field a car. The series embraced technology as a way to separate it from lesser series (stock cars had long been derisively called taxi cabs by the open wheel faithful), and car costs skyrocketed. There are only so many manufacturers, sponsors, owners, and fan dollars to go around in racing, and when the costs in one series get out of control compared to the mass exposure derived, they look elsewhere. NASCAR was/is an incredible bargain in comparison – just ask Toyota as they mount their NASCAR offensive.
Second, young racing talent like Jeff Gordon (who wanted to grow up to be like Indy champ Rich Mears) couldn’t raise the cash to get a ride. He had come up through open wheel’s training ground of Sprint cars (another series that is a husk of its former self), but by the time he was ready for an open wheel Indy car ride, it required so much driver cash to help defray costs, he could not fill a helmet bag with $1000s, and was forced to look elsewhere. The rest is NASCAR history.
Throw in the fracturing of Indy racing into two competing, stubborn camps and you have the death of a racing series.
So, how does the NHRA stay healthy, grow, and survive? Does it have to copy the NASCAR playbook and turn itself into racing entertainment to increase general public awareness and create a mass audience that more mainstream sponsors will embrace? In doing so, does it have to dilute its sporting character so much to appeal to a mass audience that it will have to introduce on-track contrivances like the NASCAR and TV network BS “Lucky Dog” position? Put my lips on an exhaust pipe if it ever comes to that in drag racing, OK?
Nevertheless, I think we have to accept that the sport of NHRA drag racing has to become entertainment for a mass audience to grow and survive, and the growth serum is live TV, not the current taped shows. I think that Olympic Curling may have higher TV ratings than these taped shows. Getting in bed with live TV is not easy – you live and die by the ratings (eyeballs), and have to have enough belief in your sport’s entertainment value not to let it be corrupted (too much) by the “big eye” (see Lucky Dog before).
A good live TV show length in this day and age is about two hours – including a pre-race show to set the stage. That’s long enough to sell some TV sponsor time, and win the hearts and short-attention span American minds of the great unwashed who don’t know a drag race from a drag queen. A larger “casual fan” audience will make it more attractive to more “mainstream” sponsors – NHRA needs more like POWERade and UPS. And like it or not, those sponsors still look to a live telecast as the main media to reach the masses. (Shameless plug: the enlightened and forward thinking also look to Internet magazines like DRO, too.)
How do you get the current event into two hours? You have to combine or kill some classes. One major action you take is that you have only one Fuel class, and it’s Funny Car. (Remember that price of progress line now.) Migrate the current Top Fuel teams into Funny Car to build one large strong field at the top of the ladder. Look at it from a sponsor’s point of view – how much more signage area would there be available with all those Funny Cars? Look at it from an owner’s view – the costs would be less to run only one Fuel class; increased sponsor opportunities too if running multiple cars. Look at it from the fan’s point of view -- all the big names going up against each other. Look at it from a TV producer’s view – build up to one full-on winner takes all climax.
I also think there is more fan interest in Funny Car than fuelers because a casual fan can almost suspend their disbelief long enough to imagine at least sitting in a Funny – they are more entertaining for that. Also Funny cars fill up the TV screen better than a fueler. Top Fuel is a wonderful grand exercise in racing tech, but its time is past in a racing world that demands a more compact, entertaining show.
That’s enough for this session. We didn’t offer any survival packets for the vital Sportsman classes – but I’d sure like to hear any you have. 
