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This week I received an email from Drag Racer PR person Joanne
Dawson. She’s been working with alcohol Funny Car owner/driver
Ron Chaffee, a director of Operation Interdependence, which
is a civilian group that distributes goods from the US to
our troops in Iraq in the form of personalized care packages.
They will be collecting contributions at the April POWERade
event in Houston for more packages. O.I. delivered 379,000
packages last year and nearly one million since 2001 to our
troops overseas. Of course I’m hitting them up to include
car magazines, we’ll see how that turns out.
Since the Army has been using drag racing fans as a base
from which to recruit, I made a few calls to the NHRA ticket
office prior to the Winternationals and the Gators to see
how the military is supported when they want to see a drag
race. I asked if they offer military discounts to uniformed
personnel. “Let me check,” said the woman on the
line putting me on hold, she came back to say that there was
no discount for the military, uniformed or not. “If
you can bring a group of 21 we’ll give you a group ticket
discount,” she said.
Then calling the Las Vegas Motor Speedway ticket office I
found that the speedway offers discounts to our military for
both Friday and Saturdays at LVMS for the truck and Busch
events, but not Sunday’s Cup race. According to the
person on the phone this is a policy to support our troops.
The Texas Motor Speedway offers no such discount for NASCAR
events.
Since our military sponsors a handful of racing teams within
the Busch and Nextel Cup series and Don Schumacher’s
dragster to bolster recruiting, shouldn’t we be giving
something back to our troops with reduced ticket prices as
some tracks do on Friday and Saturday? Can you think of any
Thursday, Friday or Saturday POWERade event that wouldn’t
benefit by welcoming more military butts in the grandstands.
Most recruits and uniform military fit well within the coveted
demographic we need to grow our sport. IHRA offers military
discounts for some of their national meets, how about it NHRA;
let's all give something back to our troops. With this kind
of support, maybe we’ll awaken an interest in drag racing
as Wally Parks observed back in the 1940’s with our
troops returning after their service in World War II. 
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