I have joked that to get the attention of NHRA about the plight of our local dragstrips, it’d take a teenager who is racing an out of control 5.0 Mustang and wipes out a busload of Catholic nuns on the way to Midnight Mass to get the Suits to notice.

It is really sad that there is no proactive arm, the way SEMA works, an arm of the NHRA watching out for local drag racers and our vanishing dragstrips. The devolution of the National Hot Rod Association into a rules-making insurance company that also has a traveling circus on Goodyear tires is also sad. 

I re-checked Wally’s founding words: “NHRA's mission statement is to preserve, protect, and perpetuate the sport of drag racing.” How is the current management doing this now?

This statement doesn’t say one word about the professional show, Tom Compton’s compensation, the NHRA bottom line, or covering the sanctioning body’s legal ass, which seems to be all they are now concerned with.

Money is being spent by the NHRA elite like a bunch of drunken sailors on shore leave, without one ounce of member oversight! The Suits in Glendora haven’t a clue, nor any interest in what goes on at local dragstrips. They weren’t racers or race fans before they got their jobs. Their only concern seems to be the bottom line, not the betterment of the sport.

Hopefully the International Hot Rod Association will have that interest to eventually replace NHRA on the local level and in Heritage-style drag racing. Damn, recently they even blessed an IHRA Division 7!

The recent amateur pronouncements of nullification about the final nitro rounds of the March Meet are symptomatic of NHRA’s arrogance and disdain for sportsman/hobby racers. I know, they were way too busy with Big Show commitments to make a timely notification of rules violations, but who cares that it took ten days (!) to declare a final set of winners; it’s not the Big Show. 

The NHRA has yet to figure out how to monetize this kind of racing and they still have no idea why sizable crowds would attend an event like the March Meet without luxury boxes available.

I contend that the NHRA is so far out of touch with both membership and the other-than-professional racers they are supposed to serve, that SoCal racers could actually be better off if the IHRA moved into the local level replacing the arrogant NHRA. After all, at local tracks the NHRA sanction now means little to the local racer except as an insurance agent.