NHRA letter on AHFS....

[Bob Bender]

Wade, great letter. I agree 100%.

[Another Friendly Racer]

I agree that it is a well thought out letter that Wade wrote with many excellent points. If we get rid of the AHFS, where do we go? Back to the days of a committee determining horsepower? I remember certain guys with unique cars qualifying -.30 under all year just to get 10 horsepower taken off their combo that in actuality already had #1 qualifier potential. The next year they would dominate qualifying/ class eliminations. There are enough politics involved already with the factory race cars being allowed to destroy the actual stockers. I dont want to go back to those days of more politics.

I have to believe that 95% percent of stock/super stock cars out there do not have the capability of going -1.00 under. With that being said, 95% of us keep looking for ways to go faster and keep purchasing performance parts to keep up with guys like Wade, Rock, and the other 5%.

Here might be a crazy solution: You can not dial more than 2 tenths faster than your qualifying time. You can also not run more than 2 tenths faster than your qualifying time in a heads up race. This should very much discourage sandbagging and make the AHFS greatly more effective.

[Greg Hill]

Wade, that is an excellent thought. The biggest problem I see is the bogus factoring of these new combinations. If you raise the trigger or make it more difficult to get horsepower it just takes longer for these obviously under factored cars to get hit. We need a horsepower committee made up of racers, engine builders, and tech people with some brains to get the hp closer on these new combinations. If that were done I would agree whole heartedly with you.

The problem is that NHRA is never going to give up any control on this because they have been bought and paid for by Chrysler and Ford. There are some older combinations that may be a little soft 10-20 hp but a lot of the new carts are still as much as 100 soft. As long as this is in place there really is no good way to regulate hp. One of these new cars gets hit like the 5.7 hemi to the tune of 99hp it's still #1 qualifier at Norwalk.

[Doug McCue]

one thing that will bring more sportman racers out is a bigger payback similar to the stock/superstock advertised elsewhere in this forum.