How would you SAVE CLASS RACING ???

[Alan Roehrich]

Here is what people need to understand about contingency money, from the point of view of the contingency sponsor, and remember, those are the people you are expecting to pay you real money, out of their pocket, for your hobby.

A sponsor is a person who pays you money in exchange for positive marketing exposure. They expect you to win or do well in competitive racing, and show good performance, to give their potential customers a positive view of their product. They absolutely MUST be able to, for lack of a better term, BRAG about your performance.

If you do not beat other cars racing heads up, and go fast, they have nothing to brag about, and no real reason to sponsor you when it comes to class eliminations.

If there aren't any cars for you to race, that is not any fault of theirs. And you cannot reasonably expect a sponsor to pay for anything other than results and positive exposure.

Contingency sponsors are in business. This is not a hobby for them. It is how they make a living. Sponsor money comes from the marketing budget. Marketing must bring in customers.

Very few of us do this as anything other than a hobby. As such, if we're not producing real results for contingency sponsors, we have no reasonable expectation to be paid by them.

Something else needs to be clear here. Drag racing is the ONLY sport that will even begin to tolerate classes where only one car shows up to race. Go ANYWHERE else in the motorsports world, and see how long ANY class will last if no one shows up to race. Fans will refuse to watch one car race. If the fans are not watching, the sponsors are not getting anything for their marketing dollar. Were they in any other form of motorsports, about 90% of these classes that have 10 or less cars nation wide, would have long since been completely eliminated, or merged into something else.

Everyone needs to understand, no one owes you a place to race just because you build a car you like, or you can afford. For the tracks, for the promoters, and for the sponsors, racing is business, and most of the people on their staffs are trying to make a living and feed a family. For most of us, racing is a hobby, no matter what you spend. Those people trying to make a living do not owe us a place to play with our hobby toys out of the goodness of their hearts. We must give them something in exchange for the place to play with our hobby, or we can expect to have no place to play, because we have no reasonable expectation of having others pay for our hobby.

We ALL really have to look at this from the position of what the sponsors get out of what they spend on us. No matter how much you happen to like a particular class or car, if there's not much competition in that class, there's just no way you can reasonably expect a business to pay for that class.

Sure, maybe it only pays $100 for a win for each decal. But look at it like this. If 60-70 cars show up at a race that has class eliminations, odds are that only about 1/2 of those cars are going to have another car in their class, at best. So you have 30-35 or so cars making a single for class. If you have a big market share, say 50-60% or better, that means you're going to pay out $1500 or so for single passes. So you're paying $1500 per event that runs class, for something that does not pay you back in marketing results.

While some people will say "well, it's only $1500", but it isn't their money, and if it happens at 5-7 races, then it becomes $7500 or more. Now some people are going to say, "well, those companies make millions of dollars", but the fact remains, they make that money by spending wisely. Think about what other marketing they can buy for $7500 to $10K a year or more.

Now, to be fair about this, I think NHRA shoulders a ton of blame for this. They do such a poor job of promoting the classes, and such a poor job of showcasing class eliminations, that it severely cuts the value of the dollars that contingency sponsors spend to pay us. Further, while it does take some money for NHRA to manage the contingency program, their cut is entirely out of line for what they do for the money they are paid.

Last year, we had a class win, an event win, and a runner up, at one event, for two cars that I served as engine builder and crew chief on. So I was there to see what NHRA did as far as the contingency program was concerned. I can promise you they didn't spend a lot of money paying the guys that checked those two cars for decals on Sunday. We filled out the sheets, and showed them the decals. Then we had to show the contingency sponsors proof of purchase. It ain't like NHRA had a dozen people doing all the paper work for us.

There is plenty of blame for the current situation to go around. No one has to like it, but we all have to live with the facts and the reality of the situation. Companies are under no obligation what so ever to step up and pay contingency. In this economy, they absolutely must consider where they spend money, and what return they get for it. The simply fact is that several companies have gone bankrupt, some have survived, some have not.