NASCAR isn’t doing so well either

You mentioned that NHRA might move reunion events to bigger facilities but it won’t be anytime soon. They announced at Bowling Green that they renewed for 5 more years. You also spoke about how NASCAR puts over 100,000 at Bristol short track event and why NHRA cannot fill the seats at Bristol Dragway, The NASCAR event at Bristol was one of the hardest tickets to get in racing at one time is having trouble selling seats there also and had nowhere close to 100,000 people there recently.

Randy Vowels
Kentucky

Lots to say…

Latest Burk's blast: Correct on several items you covered, but off base on a couple of others.

1. I don't believe that IRL is a "buy a ride" deal. It's not. That pretty much is a main deal in drag racing in the more important categories, and many of the sportsman categories.

2. NHRA racers could not travel overseas like IRL and F1. The budgets for IRL and (especially) F1 make NHRA budgets look like nickel and dime operations. Much of it is due to the overseas racing schedules and the ridiculous travel costs involved.

3. Like your idea of "everyone races" in the nitro category, with one stipulation. Each car MUST run a competitive elapsed time for the respective category. We DO NOT need a 10-second TF or funny car in the field. The requirement of a competitive performance effort would at least require each racer to make a legitimate effort.

Here's an idea. Take the average time of all the qualifying runs. Each car MUST make four qualifying runs. If they break, the time it takes to roll through the light counts into their average. If they cannot get through the finish line (due to breakage or something), they will be awarded the slowest run of that round recorded by any other driver. This would help to eliminate (or reduce) the number of "spin the tires and click it runs". Those are extremely boring and a waste of money spent on the tickets.

The oil down rule you state would be nice. Unfortunately, the smaller budgeted teams would normally be the ones getting burned on that one, as many can barely afford the outdated parts they run. A used pair of shoes is seldom as a good as a new pair.

4. One thing that I find as a slap in the face is when NHRA lowers the ticket prices. It is a nice idea, but when you already bought advanced tickets, you feel like you just got kicked in the private area with steel toed boots. If they are going to do that (it is a nice idea to get more butts in the seats), give those of us who did buy advance tickets a refund to the level of the new reduced price. It they are going to keep doing this, I will no longer buy advanced tickets. Another little note on that. Those are reduced general admission tickets; no seat. Just read the article one of your writers posted back a couple weeks on that. Some tracks have little or NO general admission seating, so the tickets allow you in, but you can't see anything.