:  Which leads us to the next question. One of the issues the ADRL has, perhaps not from an entertainment point of view but certainly from a marketing point of view, is that it has a relatively small car count. It’s important to manufacturers that there ISN’T a small car count. Are you going to be doing anything other than what we’ve already talked about to increase your car count?

KN:  Jessica and I looked up the average car count in Pro Extreme between 2010 and 2012. The average was 26 in 2010 and dropped to 23 in 2012. If you take the core categories of the ADRL, which are Pro Extreme, Pro Nitrous, Extreme Pro Stock, Extreme 10.5, and Extreme Pro Motorcycle, and then throw in the Juniors, the ADRL averaged 125 cars with six classes in 2010 and averaged only 139 cars with eight classes in 2012. So to answer your question, I have goals set for us for 2013. If we achieve those goals, --and I think they are very realistic goals partially based on adding Top Sportsman and Top Dragster -- I think that car count could be somewhere on the lowest end at 186 and on the highest end, 280. I think there’s several things that will contribute.

I know this is easy for me to say as a promoter as opposed to a racer, but I think there’s too much emphasis put on purse size. If you win every race in Pro Extreme or any of our other classes, you’re number-one qualifier at every race, and you win the championship, based on hard numbers that have been given to me by someone who’s run a race team in the past, you’re probably going to offset about 30% of your expenses. So just as too much emphasis can be placed on track prep, I think too much emphasis can be placed on purse. And I don’t say that to give myself an out and pay less. If you look at the history of the ADRL from 2005 to 2010, the purses grew every year. Race purses, event purses, we grew our overall dollar amount that we paid out to the racers every year.

: But the car count didn’t necessarily grow.

KN:  Exactly. So my point is this. We really do place too much emphasis on this. Whether we pay $500 to qualify and $10,000 to win or $250 to qualify and $5,000 to win in our pro categories, it’s never going to be enough. Sebastian Bettel got $100 million for winning the Formula 1 championship. You win the FedEx cup on the PGA Tour and it’s worth tens of millions of dollars. You win the Daytona 500, the Indianapolis 500.  You look at the very top of the food chain in drag racing: NHRA Top Fuel and Funny Car. Look at their championship purse. I believe it’s $400,000 to win the championship.

: Well, let’s put that in perspective. The Daytona 500 pays more in one single race to the winner than an NHRA guy can win if he wins all 26 races and the World Championship.

KN:  So there you go. I think that drag racing, even on its lowest levels, has always been a rich man’s hobby. God bless the Frankie Taylors and the Doug Riesterers of the world, or the Chris Karamesines and Mitch Kings and Jack Wyatt and the Creasy family and the Laganas. People who have been competing at the highest levels of our sport. How they do it year to year leaves a lot of people on both sides of the fence, whether they’re fans or on the business side, scratching their heads. Again, I’m not trying to build in excuses for not paying enough. We’ll never pay enough! We could pay $50,000 to win each race and $1,000,000 to win the championship and it’d be great! It’d be spectacular and it would go farther to cover the costs of what we do, but if you take the most we’ve ever paid out to win a Pro Extreme event and win the championship and you bundle it all together, the guy that won it still probably spent three times that amount in order to win.

: Television. Is that in the future for the ADRL?

KN:  Absolutely.

: Like network television?

KN:  Like I’m going to do everything in my power. It’s not too long ago that the ADRL was on ESPN2. It’s something that I think is vital for the long-term health of the ADRL and it’s something that we are working diligently on. Time frames are hard to nail down right now, but if it’s not in the very near future it won’t be due to lack of effort, I can tell you that.

: How large do you anticipate your schedule becoming? As in number of events.

KN:   I don’t see us holding more than ten events in the very near future, the next three to five years. We hope to get back to ten events for 2014, though it may be only nine. One of the most difficult things we do each year is narrowing it down to ten events. In this case it was very difficult ending up with only eight. We were in lengthy discussions with both Bill Bader Jr. at Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Ohio, and Lex Dudas at Maple Grove Raceway in Reading, Pennsylvania. Both reached out to us and we did everything in our power to put dates on those two calendars. Any time we make a Facebook post, the response includes a racetrack with a question mark. In other words, why aren’t we coming back to Bristol, why aren’t we coming back to Charlotte, to Dallas. There are lots of factors that go into where we hold these events.