As a certified geezer here are a few things I wish could change on the FOX1/NHRA race broadcast.

1. Please please put a box on the screen after every race you show with both drivers’ RT, ET, and MPH and leave it up long enough for me to read it. About the only way you can have the time to read the numbers for both cars (if they happened to give them) is to record the live broadcast and then watch it with a finger on the pause button.

2. Please take advantage of the knowledge and inside contacts of Bruno Massel, Tony Pedregon and Lewis Bloom to bring viewers some real news and inside info as well as the public service Drag Racing 101 segments.

3. Please use the 50-60 minutes between the semis and finals to run some interesting interviews and features that haven’t already aired on the qualifying broadcast. That time before the final is perfect for driver, tuner and owner interviews, or perhaps an editorial.

One more observation about the new FS1/NHRA format and coverage. When ESPN hosted the NHRA broadcasts they showed virtually every lap of qualifying and eliminations, but that certainly isn’t the case now. Only selected qualifying laps from each session make the TV show. Why?

That change and the subsequent loss of airtime could cause severe economic problems for those teams without major sponsors. The few privateer Top Fuel and Funny Cars teams left often sell one-race sponsorships based in large part on the sponsor assuming that even if the team doesn’t qualify they would get some national TV exposure for their brand. If the broadcast content continues as it has for the first two races of 2016 those one-race associate sponsorships are going to be much harder to sell and fewer independent teams will be filling the bottom quarter of the fields.

As an example, during the two-hour Saturday broadcast of the qualifying from Phoenix there wasn’t one image of Terry McMillen’s Amalie Oil-backed Top Fueler and that company ran ads on the Sunday broadcast! No quid pro quo on the NHRA broadcast?

I know that IRGSE CEO Lenchenski has some grandiose plans for the future of the venerable IHRA sanctioning body. And if by a minor miracle he is able to develop and fund a Top Fuel version of F-1 I’ll be the first to applaud him. But his decision to move the World Series of Drag Racing from its traditional home at the former Cordova Raceway Park (which IRGSE bought last year) where it has been an amazingly popular and profitable race for more than 60 years and move it to Memphis defies logic.

The 500+ sportsman racers and small series that camp and race at the World Series probably won’t travel the 500+ miles from the Quad Cities for a weekend in Millington, Tenn., which is the closest town to the track.

The only thing that could justify the move would be that the Memphis office of tourism and Sunoco were willing to pay a lot more to sponsor that race than O’Reilly’s Auto Parts had been paying the Cordova track. If I read the press release announcing the move correctly then IRGSE also is going to remove any pretense of the World Series being a real race. They informed their Nitro Funny Car teams on March 1 that the points race scheduled for the World Series is no longer and those cars have been added to the July IHRA national event at IRGSE-owned Maryland International Raceway.

Whatever happens from this point on the World Series will be entirely different with a new format and host racetrack.

It seems to me that the Peter Clifford NHRA wants to diminish the importance of speed in NHRA professional drag racing. reporting speeds along with the ET’s. For instance, during the FS1 broadcast of Phoenix last weekend every time they showed a qualifying sheet only the ET numbers were shown. I should have suspected something like thus when the NHRA decided speed records were no longer worth championship points. I hate this change in a sport that has always been about record setting ETs and speeds!

Donald Long’s “Lights Out 7” race for doorslammers only is truly a “throwback” drag race event that reminded me of what I saw at the U.S. Nationals 25 years ago. A unique event that is a “must attend” for those racers and their fans.  There were over 450 cars, grandstands that were jammed with fans, and racers who paid their way into the event. The crowd was very knowledgeable about the cars and racers. They couldn’t have cared less about litigations, liability, or political correctness; they were only there to watch their hero “small tire” racers and race cars go heads-up to see who had the quickest and fastest car that day. Now that is drag racing as God (and Wally Parks) intended it to be.

There is no doubt that almost all motorsports are losing fans base. NASCAR recently refurbished the Daytona Motor Speedway and removed 45,000 seats due to lack of attendance and sales. I think one of the reasons for the lack of attendance at some motorsports events like professional drag racing is that the target age group (18-44) cannot relate to the cars they are seeing. They all mostly drive compact or Import cars which have little presence at NHRA national events.

So most of that demographic has no history to know or recognize a Top Fuel, Funny Car or even Pro Stock. When I was growing up in the ’60s all the boys in my high school classes knew what a Top Fuel Dragster looked like or that a Pro Stock car looked identical to what you saw on the dealership floor and wanted to buy. Even if you didn’t go to the races there were a ton of “B” movies with a drag racing theme.

I don’t think today’s generation, be they Gen-Y or Millennials, have much interest in NHRA Pro Stock, Top Fuel, Pro Mod or Funny Cars. They cannot relate to or identify what brand a Pro Stocker is and the only thing they know about nitro cars is they are loud.

Currently Sport Compact and 10.5 tire races such as the ones Donald Long and the Miller Bros. promote are the best attended by fans and competitors who have direct knowledge of the race cars and racing. NHRA’s problem may be that Pro Stock cars still look like Pro Mods and that most fans in the 18-44 bracket only see nitro cars when they attend a national event.

If the NHRA is going to regain its stature with the fans and business it had in the 1970s and ’80s they had better start listening to someone other than themselves. Or they could take a page out of the NASCAR playbook by removing some seats and gettin some cars that are relevant to spectators.