A question for the IHRA guys

[Chad Rhodes]

Originally Posted by Michael Beard

It's a sad state of affairs, but every time IHRA has addressed something that somebody said, "If you'd only...", they still don't show up. Eliminate one excuse, and they come up with another. I wish I knew the answer.

If you stop and think about it, scheduling conflicts and access to your customer ( event location), should be priority #1 to increase car counts. If a racer has to drive 8-9 hours with todays price of fuel, and possibly miss an NHRA national or divisional to go "try out" an IHRA race, then it may not look very appealing. IHRA needs to think in terms of AND, and never in EITHER/OR when it comes to NHRA.

It needs to be "well we can run these NHRA races AND we can run these IHRA races", not "Should I EITHER go to the NHRA divisional, OR should I go to the IHRA national". Once you get some of these guy to come AND race, they may be tempted to race more of them. But you will be hard pressed to get many to forgo an NHRA race in favor of the IHRA race, unless it is literally in their back yard. And that may be a challenge.

[Ed Wright]

Good points Chad.

[X-TECH MAN]

Originally Posted by Chad Rhodes

If you stop and think about it, scheduling conflicts and access to your customer ( event location), should be priority #1 to increase car counts. If a racer has to drive 8-9 hours with todays price of fuel, and possibly miss an NHRA national or divisional to go "try out" an IHRA race, then it may not look very appealing. IHRA needs to think in terms of AND, and never in EITHER/OR when it comes to NHRA.

It needs to be "well we can run these NHRA races AND we can run these IHRA races", not "Should I EITHER go to the NHRA divisional, OR should I go to the IHRA national". Once you get some of these guy to come AND race, they may be tempted to race more of them. But you will be hard pressed to get many to forgo an NHRA race in favor of the IHRA race, unless it is literally in their back yard. And that may be a challenge.

IHRA could NOT get the NHRA guys to come and race when the race was in thier back yard with NOTHING going on within several hundred miles and the payouts were on par with NHRA years ago back in the early 1990's. Budds Creek Md. for example and not one Div. 1 car showed up. Zip, zero, nadda ! That was before the crate motored class even existed and we did tear downs at every race. What was the excuse back then when the economy was alive and strong?

[Myron Piatek]

Originally Posted by Arnold Greene

Just my opinion.......they don't expect traditional stockers and super stockers to attend. They are content with production super stockers and crate motor stockers. The advantage in qualifying is a little ridiculous from the crate motor indexes to traditional stocker indexes. Again, just my opinion, and I have raced several races with them in the last ten years.

Some recent sample Nitro Jam qualifying sheets.

Dinwiddie, Virginia-
http://board.moparts.org/ubbthreads/...=0#Post6331304

Epping, NH-
http://www.dragracecentral.com/DRCSt...r2010#indextop

Budds Creek, MD-
http://www.dragracecentral.com/DRCSt...r2010#indextop

Martin, MI-
http://www.dragracecentral.com/DRCSt...r2010#indextop

There is no dominance of crate motor cars at a national level. There are more at the top on a divisional level and the region does have a lot to do with it. But it still boils down to "racing" and the regular Stockers don't have to worry about heads-up with the crates anyway. (Unlike the new cars, like Mike mentioned.) There are only so many cars that are fast enough to be #1 and it's not usually a crate.