SRAC Meetings

[Greg Hill]

What's discussed by SRAC members doesn't matter. NHRA doesn't listen and furthermore doesn't care. The SRAC is a sham. Anybody that believes that they have any influence on decisions made by NHRA is naive. This could have been a really good thing but the management at NHRA never intended for it to work to benefit the sportsman racers. As long as there is no power vested in the SRAC it's not relevant, because NHRA just does what it wants.

Two years ago I was at Gainesville and was a part of the first SRAC meeting which Graham Light conducted. I went into that meeting with my eyes wide open knowing how sprtsman racers had been treated over the years and not really expecting it to amount to much. Leaving the meeting I was cautiously optimistic because Graham Light's message to us was, this is your deal and as long as it doesn't affect the pros and doesn't cost a lot of money, you guys can decide what you want ot do. At first it seemed like it was working ok. We all communicated by e-mail and talked about things that our division members brought to us. We discussed lots of issues and if we felt something needed to be done we voted on it and sent it on to NHRA for implementation. I will say that Bob Lang was very helpful in guiding us in understanding the way NHRA worked and how we had to do things if we were to be effective. We were successful getting a couple of things done early on but by mid summer anything we sent to NHRA was routinely denied and the message we were getting was to just be quiet.

By the end of the year it was clear that any time spent doing the business of the SRAC was a waste of time. As Woodro said,at that time he and I resigned. NHRA is never going to give sportsman racers a voice in determining what the rules should be or how they are enforced, even though I think it would be in their best interest to do so. They are very short term thinking and are really interested only in how to make more money for themselves. When have you ever seen them do anything to promote sportsman racing or anything to encourage growth of sportsman racing?

If their is no money in it for them they will not spend any effort or time doing anything. This is a non profit organization that operates about like some of the big banks did in the last few years. Until we have a sportsman racers organization that has some power nothing will ever change.