Lack Of S/SS Magazine Coverage

[Ed Wright]

Terry, it's not the 2.0 gear sets that make them last. I have customers with trucks showing well over 200,000 miles, with 4.10 gears, and still use no oil & run like new. One of my heros, Bennie Osborn (Used to run Top Fuel) made a real good living over hauling 100,000 mile Chevy pickups. Cleaner running and less oil contamination with EFI is a big contributor to that.

Thankfully, Bennie has retired. He would be like the Maytag repairman now.

[X-TECH MAN]

Originally Posted by CBS

I have to comment on this one....I was an old car kind of guy too...certainly loved old camaro's....chevelles and vettes....owned, raced and worked on many.....and I loved them....I had no use for fuel injection and overhead cams....and all this new stuff....but being kinda open minded.....I said why not ...lets try it.....

And of course now its pretty neat.....a tremendous amount of work but a lot of fun also....the new engines are really well developed from the factory probably because of guys like Terry that worked on those old combos for years and many of those things are standard on engines today......We done many things to our cars to make it much easier to work on....which I think scares a lot of people away....I know I was...but all in all when you get it the way you want...its no different than the old cars.....just a few more wires for fuel injection......lol...some of you old timers would be experts in no time...and probably love it....try tuning cylinder 6 only in 2 minutes.....with a couple of keystrokes.....

I still enjoy driving my 170 mph super gas vette.....but the 08 CJ is a blast.....

Rock Haas
323 SS/DA
302 S/G

It was in Drag Racing Action Nov 09 issue.....

Dont take this the wrong way and I DO think your car is cool but how many would be running these newer cars if they DID NOT have a favorable HP rating (excluding the "hard to find parts" excuse)? Yes they are eaiser (to a point) to work on after removing all of the junk that a stock new car has installed that in the way but you cant do all of that on a street driven car. Thats race car stuff. Ever since the manufacturers went from a gross rating to a net rating its been an up hill battle to place a close and fair HP rating on these cars. The blower on the new Mustangs is just another variable to deal with. Maybe its time to classify combos some other way? Dont ask me how as I sure dont know.

[X-TECH MAN]

Originally Posted by Ed Wright

Terry, it's not the 2.0 gear sets that make them last. I have customers with trucks showing well over 200,000 miles, with 4.10 gears, and still use no oil & run like new. One of my heros, Bennie Osborn (Used to run Top Fuel) made a real good living over hauling 100,000 mile Chevy pickups. Cleaner running and less oil contamination with EFI is a big contributor to that.

Thankfully, Bennie has retired. He would be like the Maytag repairman now.

OK....Im with you and I want to thank you publicly for helping me figure out what was wrong with my vette several months ago. I lost some meat on my knuckles but it worked. Thanks again.

[Dion Hildebrandt]

Originally Posted by CBS

I have to comment on this one....I was an old car kind of guy too...certainly loved old camaro's....chevelles and vettes....owned, raced and worked on many.....and I loved them....I had no use for fuel injection and overhead cams....and all this new stuff....but being kinda open minded.....I said why not ...lets try it.....

And of course now its pretty neat.....a tremendous amount of work but a lot of fun also....the new engines are really well developed from the factory probably because of guys like Terry that worked on those old combos for years and many of those things are standard on engines today......We done many things to our cars to make it much easier to work on....which I think scares a lot of people away....I know I was...but all in all when you get it the way you want...its no different than the old cars.....just a few more wires for fuel injection......lol...some of you old timers would be experts in no time...and probably love it....try tuning cylinder 6 only in 2 minutes.....with a couple of keystrokes.....

I still enjoy driving my 170 mph super gas vette.....but the 08 CJ is a blast.....

Rock Haas
323 SS/DA
302 S/G

It was in Drag Racing Action Nov 09 issue.....

I have to agree I like my 1970 small block chevelle well enough but it is a dinosaur,I built what I had and used what I know. If (when) those new z-28's are accepted I would love to have one of those, after all I installed a data aquisition into the car so why not use a laptop to tune the whole car with a few key strokes. for the record the car is older than me but my 6 year old niece runs circles around me with her computer skills.

[Bob Don]

I worked for the late Steve Collison from '81 to '93. Most of my articles appeared in Super Stock & Drag Illustrated but I also wrote articles for Car Craft, Bracket Racing USA, and Muscle Mustangs and Fast Fords. I tried to highlight class racers whenever possible and did features on Dave LeBrun, Alan Peters, and Jim Barber to name a few. I love seeing magazine features on class racers. My friend Johnny D is doing a pretty good job at Drag Racing Action (When was the last time you saw a A/SA on the COVER of a national car magazine?) and I have seen some nice pieces in National Dragster.

I too love the old muscle but I also see a great diversity of combinations in other classes as well (like Art Leong's SS Neon). In a utopian world, I would like to see a resurrection of SS&DI but I realize the audience would be limited. Evan is right in that the bottom line is the bottom line. Selling magazines is the goal which means presenting a product that appeals to as many people as possible.

(BTW Evan, I am semi-retired now so if you're looking for a writer, let me know.)

[Jeff Lee]

If you want to see more articles to your style of racing, and an article appears on the news stand, buy the magazine. Don't just read the article you care about with subscription inserts dropping on the floor and placing it back on the rack when your done!
Send the editor a letter and let them know that's the kind of stuff that made you pay $5.99 for an issue that you could subscribe to for $1.50 per issue (the profit margins are huge on rack sales). Better yet, order a subscription at the same time. Ask for more articles. Send a picture of your own car, they may make a feature on it. I did that once with my A/FS Daytona and HPM did a full feature on it. You may even get a sponsor because of it.
I admit I want to just grab the mag from the rack and read only the interesting article. But I just bought DRA because it had 2 Pontiac SS'ers in it (Petersen & Angeles). I'll follow my own advice and send a thank you to the editor.

[Gary Smith]

Originally Posted by Bob Don

I worked for the late Steve Collison from '81 to '93. Most of my articles appeared in Super Stock & Drag Illustrated but I also wrote articles for Car Craft, Bracket Racing USA, and Muscle Mustangs and Fast Fords. I tried to highlight class racers whenever possible and did features on Dave LeBrun, Alan Peters, and Jim Barber to name a few. I love seeing magazine features on class racers. My friend Johnny D is doing a pretty good job at Drag Racing Action (When was the last time you saw a A/SA on the COVER of a national car magazine?) and I have seen some nice pieces in National Dragster.

I too love the old muscle but I also see a great diversity of combinations in other classes as well (like Art Leong's SS Neon). In a utopian world, I would like to see a resurrection of SS&DI but I realize the audience would be limited. Evan is right in that the bottom line is the bottom line. Selling magazines is the goal which means presenting a product that appeals to as many people as possible.

(BTW Evan, I am semi-rettired now so if you're looking for a writer, let me know.)

Bob I've read your stuff in BRUSA and always enjoyed it. Guys like you & Collison were the ones who made those mags great. (Evan I still think your an exception under todays standards as you've kept the faith LOL!!)
In fact I still have many of those mags packed away!!

Jeff I agree. In todays world of instant gratification and short attention span many readers fail to provide quality positive input like they did during the days of Car Craft All Stars etc.

[SS Engine Guy]

Personally I really like the new stuff in race configuration. Like was said earlier, once you get the engine compartment layed out like you want it and all the added junk removed they aren't bad to work on at all. I have to agree with X-TECH though. If you took the 350/300 and put it at 250 hp. it would be one BAD and under-rated combo even if it is old technology. Same deal only in reverse. It all comes down to the factoring as was noted. Got to remember that the 350/300 was a mid level performance motor as offered. Not a tricked out L-88 or LT-1 with domed pistons, flat tappet cam, aluminum intake and a Holley.

[J DeForrest]

I have no affiliation with them, but "Drag Racing Action" has at least 1 sportsman feature a month. Past 2-3 years have had David Rampy, Gary Richard, Iggie Boicesco, Shawn Langdon, Jim Boudreau, Darren Smith, Tracy Dennis, Frank Maiolo, Will Hatcher, Dave Layer, Brian Browell, ETC. Worth checking out in my opinion.

Jason

[Bret Kepner]

I guess I have a legitimate reason to post a response. Some of you know, (and most shouldn’t care!), I wrote for Super Stock & Drag Illustrated from 1977 to the bitter end of its final incarnation. Although I eventually carried the title of Senior Editor, I usually contributed event coverage and vehicle features. I would imagine the only articles under my byline which the regulars on this forum would recognize would be my annual coverage of SS/AA class eliminations at Indy from 1983 through 2000 which maintained enough focus on that class to eventually warrant the creation of the Hemi Challenge. When the magazine died, I devoted my energy to getting Indy’s SS/AA class eliminations on television and achieved that goal in 2001. However, that’s another (unpublished) story.

I’ve been editor of three publications and have had manuscripts, (concerning drag racing), published in sixty-two titles over the past thirty-five years. The point made by Evan, even in his attempt to make it more palatable for folks on this board, is critical for the survival of anything in life. It’s not 1970 anymore. In fact, the world is now two full generations removed from that era. If that’s impossible to accept, the world has already passed you by….decades ago.

Forty years ago, the sport embraced only two segments. If you weren’t racing in one of four professional divisions, you were class racing. Other than test-and-tune events at a handful of tracks, that’s all there was to drag racing. There were very few tracks offering a bracket racing option in 1970, (even as a singular entity), and most of the few which did have a bracket program presented it in what now would be called “index form”. We all know what happened to class racing so I won‘t bore you with a history lesson. The fact remains that, because of what happened to class racing, enthusiasts devoted their energy to new types of drag racing. Bracket racing, index racing, and a trillion different new heads-up classifications helped drag racing progress.

Forty years later, the only viable market for the intricacies and complexity of class racing are the same folks who were watching and competing in class racing forty years earlier. The world moved on.

Consider the basic concepts that no school has taught carburetor science for the past two decades and that automotive sales are based on every person's desire for the latest technology, peformance and convenience. Currently, I spend a huge amount of my time with racers between the ages of seventeen and thirty. They have no use for traditional class racing much in the same way a racer in 1970 had no desire to spend time thrashing a forty-horsepower four-cylinder 1930 Ford Model A. The technology was forty years advanced and the power could be bought and tuned to unimaginable performance levels. However, everybody here knew that so where’s the news?

The original lure of class racing was never in winning the eliminator; the objective for the construction of any vehicle was to win class…period. As the focus shifted toward winning the eliminator, the emphasis to most novices became placed on bracket racing. In fact, there were very few places to compete with a sportsman machine in a heads-up, no-breakout format, (outside of contemporary class eliminations in Stock and Super Stock Eliminators), from (roughly) 1980 through 1995. When the resurgence in street car racing came to the forefront of the media fifteen years ago, a rudimentary group of three classes in the original National Muscle Car Association led to a wave of new heads-up categories under a variety of rules and sanctions which blossomed into a huge change in the sport’s basic complexion.

…or so it would seem.

In fact, nothing ever changes. The racers who are involved in “class racing” in 2010 are still building cars for heads-up competition in a variety of classifications which are just as diverse and technologically demanding as any niche in Super Stock Eliminator. They’re doing it at almost every track in the country and they’re racing for decent bucks. Most of the folks on this board, (and, for that matter, most traditional class racers), just don’t see it.

As Evan noted, there are dozens, (maybe hundreds), of associations which present heads-up competition every week of the year at hundreds of tracks. Whether it be cars with 10.5-inch tires and stock firewall locations, naturally-aspirated stock chassis cars on drag radials or 3500-pound machines with no modifications but nitrous oxide injection on 8.5-inch D.O.T. rubber, they’re all racing in a “class” and they’re doing it heads-up with no breakout or index. THAT is modern day “class racing” to the majority of the drag racing enthusiasts out there in 2010 and THAT is where the market for magazine readership is “hiding”. They’re right out there in plain sight.

The incredibly restrictive options of competing in either NHRA or IHRA Stock and Super Stock, (including, but not limited to, number of events, basic payout and opportunity for recognition), simply become a deterrent to racing when compared with the ability to race as the featured attraction for a sizeable reward in a heads-up format on a weekly level at the competitor’s choice of tracks. In other words, traditional NHRA/IHRA legal class racing appeals to almost nobody but traditional NHRA/IHRA legal class racers in the tenth year of the twenty-first century.

In reality, it’s just the same thing over and over again. Modern heads-up “class” racing is no different than B/Gas in 1954, C/Stock in 1965, D/Modified Production in 1976 or SS/HA in 1987. It just looks different and has younger people doing it.

Fans still pay to watch. Track operators still present it for the that reason. Racers still show up to enter in it because it’s all about winning the class. Magazines still publish results and features about it because it is currently what sells magazines.

If you don’t see it, you’re not watching. If you weren’t watching, you got left behind. That’s life.

Bear in mind I’m a “traditional” class racer and past NHRA National Record Holder. I’m not typing this to cause a riot. I’m typing it because it’s the truth obscured by the trees deep inside the traditional class racer’s forest.