Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobby Fazio
Thanks Tim, much appreciated. I am trying to get out to Pomona to cover the race, and hopefully get enough interviews to get us all through the winter.
As far as DRC, Rick travels solo to National Events and works his *** off in the tower to post results as quickly as he can. He clearly can not travel to divisionals and national opens so they do not get that type of coverage. He gets those results later on and then posts them.
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In the beginning, the reports (and Larry's software) came from the Racing forum on Compuserve under the RIS banner. It's been so long I don't remember exactly what the acronym was, but it seems like it was Racing Information Systems (Service?) - and covered all forms of auto racing and not just drag racing. It was a real struggle at first to even get tower access so we could view a monitor of the timing system.
The coverage was entirely volunteer. A lot of races weren't covered back then. But Ed Dykes (with a lot of behind the scenes help) managed to get Summit to back the efforts. At first, it was a National Event-only service unless someone wanted/was able to do the volunteer thing.
Summit must have liked what they saw, since a few years later they increased their support and DRC committed to covering Divisional races also. IMHO, this was the golden age and we all got spoiled.
I want to make it clear I have never seen the books nor even heard any sort of estimate how much money was involved. But I DO know that no one involved was getting rich. Rick was able to quit his day job, and about that time Larry retired. The rest of us got our expenses covered if we covered a race.
As I understand it, there was a change in management at Summit. Soon after, they severely cut back and there was just no way to continue as before. None of the people involved in DRC had the personal finances to take up the slack, though I'm pretty sure a lot of reporters would have continued if they had the mad money to pay their own way.
So this, like too many of my posts, is pretty long. I just wanted to point out that DRC didn't always cover divisionals or specials. That I probably enjoyed doing them more than a national just because of the different tracks and racers I got to experience. And that in a perfect world, I wish one of these new conglomerate drag racing companies could see the value, sales, and customer goodwill they could gain by making an agreement with people like Rick and Bobby.
But it's 2022, and the financial guys don't like "giving money away" as they see it - since they can instead throw it on their bottom line.