Burk’s Birthday Blast: Emptying my id onto the page

Professional drag racing is the only major motorsport that has multiple champions for each national event. Since the NHRA went mainstream, PR reps for race teams, the NHRA, and the IHRA have tried to explain to new fans and sponsors coming into the sport that drag racing has 8-10 race "winners" at every event. The sanctioning bodies management understood that having multiple race winners per event makes drag racing a hard sell to the mainstream media and new fans of the sport. So, the NHRA currrently concentrate a majority of their PR efforts promoting the Top Fuel, Funny Car and Pro Stock classes. They are so serious about this effort that they generally exclude or ignore all other classes on their FS1 TV broadcast.

I know why the NHRA management team has that policy, but I do not agree with it. I think a policy that basically ignores the racers and fans of classes other than T/F, F/C and P/S sends a terrible message to the fans, racers and sponsors of teams other than NHRA's elite professional classes,

I'm asking yet again: Why not elevate the NHRA's Pro Mod and Nitro Harley teams to the same status? I'm absolutely convinced that the reported financial shellacking the NHRA took settling the infamous Pro Stock Truck court case is the main reason that the NHRA management team refuses to elevate and treat the Pro Mod and Nitro bike racers as a true NHRA professional class. They are afraid of another law suit.

The NHRA knows it needs more fans in the stands and those at home tuning into the FS1 broadcast if it is to grow, I think in order to do that they must increase their TV coverage of race teams other than the elite Pro classes. In the print magazine business we learned long ago that any drag rag dedicating a majority of its pages to Top Fuel, Funny Cars, and Pro Stock didn't sell on the news stand. In fact, putting a Top Fuel or Funny Car on a magazine cover almost guaranteed the news stand sales would suffer. In the print magazine business if we were desperate to sell a lot of magazines on the news stand the answer was to put a red '69 Camaro on the cover. What that means is that a majority of racing aficionados like cars they can relate to. Professional drag racing is the only major motorsports that has multiple champions for each national event. Since the NHRA went mainstream on Fox Sports, PR reps in and outside of the NHRA have tried to explain to new fans and sponsors coming into the sport that drag racing has 8-10 race "winners" at every event. The NHRA management understand that having multiple race winners per event makes drag racing a hard sell to the mainstream media and new fans of the sport. So, the NHRA concentrates a majority of the PR efforts promoting the Top Fuel, Funny Car and Pro Stock classes. They are so serious about this effort that they generally exclude or ignore all other classes on their FS1 TV broadcast.

I know why the NHRA management team has that policy, but I do not agree with it. I think a policy that ignores the racers and fans of other classes sends a terrible message to the racers and sponsors of teams other than NHRA's elite professional classes of Top Fuel, Funny Car, Pro Stock, and Pro Stock Motorcycle.

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