When are the drag racing track owners and operators going to quit taking their fans for granted? I wonder if any of those track owner/operators would pay $500 to take the family to the U.S. Nats to sit on bleacher seats and walk a half-mile to use a Porta-Potty or nasty bathroom? Even my local class D baseball park has comfortable seats, clean bathrooms, and food courts with reasonable pricing.

If drag racing promoters want more fans attending the shows they depend on to make a profit, they better start spending more time and money catering to those fans.

PDRA's Pro Nitrous doorslammers are my new favorite class of cars to watch. My reasons for that are: 1) They have flames out of the pipes as they go down track, 2) They do big, long nitrous purges, 3) They do big long smoky burnouts. In a single word, these cars are entertaining!

Pro Extreme blown cars used to be my favorite door cars, but these days -- especially on 1/8th mile tracks -- they barely smoke the tires because they are running rear gear ratios that restrict tire speed on the burnout. Too bad, because those cars used to be the most entertaining in drag racing.

That's entertainment! Why doesn't John Force do his trademark long smoky burnouts anymore? At the height of his popularity he was famous for his burnouts. My memories are that at every race he did those burnouts his fans went crazy and would be standing and applauding as the car came down the return road. These days Force does the same non-descript burnouts the rest of his peers do. What a shame! I hear he quit doing long burnouts because his crew chiefs decided doing them adversely affected their tune-up and chances to win.

Force knows better than most that winning races or championships doesn't guarantee that a racer will get or keep sponsors. On the other hand, fan popularity does mean something to the sponsors. I know a lot of race fans who still wax nostalgic about the famous Force burnouts but I'll bet that almost none of them know what John's career-best speed or ET is or how many races he won in 2014! The sport is about entertainment.

I want to write a few words about the recent deaths of a pair of iconic and irreplaceable personalities in our sport, Chrysler engineer Tom Hoover and editor-publisher-photographer Jim Kelly.

Truthfully, I only knew each of these men through our association and love of drag racing and I actually knew little of their lives beyond our sport, but for a lot of years drag racing was my whole life and those two men had both direct and indirect influence on my drag racing life.

When I met him, Jim Kelly was winding down his storied career as a photographer to the drag racing stars and Jim Tice's AHRA house newspaper. He also started what I consider the finest weekly photo-centric drag rag of his time, Drag Sport Illustrated. In my opinion that magazine remains the finest photographic history of drag racing's golden era.

Kelly was a fantastic photographer who didn't mind helping or teaching new talent. Towards the end of his photography career when he was working for the AHRA he would shoot a single 36-exposure roll of film to cover an AHRA event from the first lap to the winner's circle. As it turned out, one roll was enough. When Kelly was elected to Don Garlits' Hall of Fame he invited all of his peers to come to Florida for the induction, and most of us did. It was a hell of a party. He was that deserving of the honor and that well loved by his peers and friends.

Tom Hoover was a member of the original Ramchargers car club and the lead Chrysler engineer in the development the Hemi-head Chrysler engine. I met and spent time with Mr. Hoover on a couple of occasions, the last being in March of this year at the Indy Cylinder Head trade show at Indianapolis, that he attended with other members of the original Ramchargers car club. What struck me about him was that even though he was well into his eighties he was still mentally on top of his game and totally consumed with drag racing and drag racers.

On that occasion he spent hours talking to Mopar racers and fans and never looked like he was bored. My lasting memory of Mr. Hoover was of him walking around the show with a big smile on his face talking racing to various dealers and looking for speed parts for the family bracket car. It was obvious that he loved racing and the racers.