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9/24/03
Is this as good as it gets?
 've
never been one to live in the past; I've always thought that
today was the "Good ol' days." I'm not a big fan of nostalgia
anything. It's not that I don't appreciate history but, like
Bill Murray's character in the film "Groundhog Day," I don't
want to re-live it constantly. I'd much rather watch
history being made than re-live it.
Having said all that, I have to admit that recently I've been looking back at drag racing's history (especially the late 1990's) with more than a little longing. Let me explain why. You see the one thing really attracted me to drag racing right from the start was my perception that it offered unlimited competition at the highest levels. It was a sport where, especially in the top classes, records and barriers seemed to fall with astonishing regularity, and those feats were accomplished with a never-ending variety of vehicles and power plants. The only real limitations were the racers' imaginations and pocketbooks. Quicker, faster, bigger and badder was what the whole deal was about.
For most of the last quarter-century or so I anticipated each national event I attended with at least the glimmer of hope that I would see some spectacular performance by a nitro burner. In the last four years or so, however, I've lost a lot of that anticipation. The sanctioning bodies have regulated the nitro-burners, the kings of the sport, into 300-mph bracket cars -- and the sanctioning bodies seem determined to keep it that way.
I'll grant you that fans aren't likely to see a three-second, four-hundred-mph pass anytime soon, but it would be nice to believe they might see a speed or elapsed time that represented a performance leap over the norm. Sadly, at least for me, that hasn't been the case for a while and it's beginning to wear down the excitement and anticipation that used to precede my attendance at national events. Frankly, those events are bordering on becoming boring. Now before you start knee-capping me and writing that nasty "love or leave it" letters about drag racing, let me explain.
The low elapsed times for a fuel dragster at the 2003 NHRA Seattle race was a 4.69! For Heaven sakes, my friend Michael Brotherton made the first Top Fuel 4.60 lap in 1994. At that same race, nitro coupes e.t.'s in the five-second range were more common than four-second laps. Those kinds of performance from drag racing's top classes aren't fun to watch, exciting or entertaining, at least for me.
The first sub-4.50 pass in a Top Fuel car occurred nearly four years ago when Larry Dixon recorded a 4.486 at Houston in April 1999. The first speed over 330 went to Tony Schumacher when he shocked the troops with a 330.23 at Phoenix in February that same year. Those standards were set over four years ago and, frankly, there seems little chance that we are going to see a 4.30-something elapsed time or a lap over 340-mph anytime soon.
Apparently, the powers that be have decided to put a lid on performance in the nitro classes for a variety of reasons. Two of most obvious would be that drag racing's nitro cars have become just too fast for more than a few of the tracks they run on. And perhaps the cars are going faster than the safety envelope of the current tires. Back when many of today's dragstrips were built no one -- and I mean no one -- could have imagined 4.40/330+ passes from dragsters or
4.70/328+ passes from funny cars. They couldn't even imagine a fuel funny car!
I'm also sure the tire companies never considered the possibility that their tires would have to survive at speeds approaching 350-mph and thousands and thousands of pounds of down force trying to flatten the tires at that speed.
As soon as Eddie Hill went in the fours, the alarm bells went off and sanctioning bodies have been trying to slow down the nitro cars ever since. They restricted the rear-end ratio to a minimum of 3.20. When that didn't work, they adopted a 90-percent nitro rule and started taking away points and money for oiling the track. None of those measures have succeeded in doing what they were intended them to do; in fact, they failed miserably.
After putting all those rules into effect, all that happened was that speeds rapidly climbed into the 325-330 mph range for both classes and e.t.'s quickly dropped into the 4.50 range for Top Fuel cars and the 4.80's for the fuel coupes.
As for reducing the number of engine explosions and fires, well, it appears those rules haven't done a very good job of that either. Ask Gary Scelzi, Frankie Pedregon, Paul Romine, Kenny Bernstein, Doug Herbert or any other fuel racer how well the rules have worked. Chances are they will tell you not very well.
Which brings me to the point. Maybe it's time for NHRA to take a page out of NASCAR's book, as well as other formerly unlimited classes like the World of Outlaws sprinters, and limit the cubic inches of the engine.
Back when NASCAR had racecars with 427-428-429 cubic inch engines and the cars would run 225 down the straights, NASCAR knew they had a problem. Their tracks and the cars couldn't handle those kinds of speeds, so Bill France made the decision to limit the engines to 355 cubic inch small blocks. Was it a drastic measure? Yes. Did it work? Also yes. Did it hurt the car count, crowds, or popularity of the sport? Emphatically no! The fact is that in all big time auto racing series except drag racing downsizing engines occasionally is just part of the game.
I'm finally convinced that many national event tracks simply are being overpowered by today's nitro burners and, in many cases, they border on not having enough shutdown area to be really safe. So, maybe it's time to downsize the cubic inch limit in Top Fuel and Fuel Funny Car, throw out the old records and start over with clean sheet of paper.
Smaller engines would probably mean less horsepower and some added expense to start with, but the upside is a rule change like that could allow the sanctioning bodies to do away with some of the restrictive rules, letting the innovators and inventors get back into the game. There is also the chance that making a mandatory engine change and less power might mean fewer tire-smoking runs and more side-by-side racing. Maybe the sanctioning bodies could spend more time and money promoting the classes instead of spending that same time and money trying to control, police and limit supposedly unlimited classes.
It would be a bitter and expensive pill for some teams, but no more than it was for the NASCAR teams when that sanctioning body decided the cars were too fast for the tracks for safety and made an engine change. Many other auto racing sanctioning bodies have followed suit since NASCAR made their decision.
Maybe drag racing would be a little -- no, make that a lot -- more entertaining if there were the chance to see new speed and elapsed time records being set instead of waiting four or five years between records.
Drag racing has always been about change. In my opinion, it's time for some drastic changes.
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