This is an interesting and thought-provoking article. But, while Jon raises many valid points especially in the latter part, I have several bones to pick.
Kids these days. I have grown weary of the moaning from people over a certain age that can be summed up: "...but the kids these days". Kids always are different than those who preceded them. Be it tastes in music or clothing or entertainment, they are by definition different. I'm sure the parents of Wally Parks' and his children felt that way about their fascination with cars. We older folks have to stop relying on this excuse, and start paying attention to them.
Short attention spans. The key thing people bemoan about "kids these days" is their short attention spans. But this plays directly into drag racing's hand. Of all sports, drag racing should be the beneficiary of this trend. After all, what sport has the advantage here: a 3-4 hour NASCAR race, a 3 hour football or baseball game, a 90 minute soccer match, or a 4 second drag race. Instead of complaining about short attention spans, NHRA should be leveraging it.
Blame the customer. A lot of this complaining boils down to blaming the customer because they don't like your product. In the marketplace, businesses that do that die. You have to make a product that your customer wants, and if you don't you either change the product or you go out of business. If someone doesn't like your product, it's not they who have the problem.
The product is stale. Drag racing began as cutting edge modifications to the cars of the day -- modifications that not only improved on the car I drove every day, but that I could do myself. In the last 60 years, cars passed drag racing by, and in doing so made drag racing irrelevant. Almost nothing that is done to a drag race car today can I go out and put on my average street car today. New heads, manifolds, fancy carbs, big exhaust, etc. all were "race on Sunday, buy on Monday" items. None of it is relevant anymore.
As one example: the percentage of the 500+ cars at a National Event that run electronic fuel injection is probably <5% while the percentage of cars on the street that DON'T is probably similar. There is more state-of-the-art technology in my son's Honda Civic than in the car that won the Pro Stock world championship. Just bring up electronics on any drag racing forum and you'll get hit with thousands of haters -- people who want it like it was. "Like it was" is irrelevant to anyone under 50.
Kids don't like cars. This is just blatant pooh. Look at the success of the Fast and the Furious franchise, the huge dollars in the amazing racing games, the success of Top Gear (one of the most watched shows on the planet), the success drifting and other younger motorsports. They still have posters on their wall of cool cars, but they are Ferraris and Lambos, and GTRs. When people say "kids don't like cars" they mean kids don't like the same cars I do. See my first point above.
Kids don't like working on cars. Kids like working on things, they do it all the time. Huge numbers of kids build their own computers, putting in the hottest graphics card, overclocking them to the fastest possible speed, swapping in new power supplies and the latest SSD hard drive. They love this kind of thing -- because it is open, easy, and encouraged by the marketplace. Vendors build the parts, people share info on how to do it, there are online forums and discussions about it, it's a rich ecosystem.
Compare this with the Honda, Toyota, and even Ford of today. These cars are locked up like Fort Knox. There used to be a similar ecosystem around the car world, but it took business away from the dealer service department. Today you can't get the service manual for a new car unless you're a dealer. You can't buy anywhere near the level of add-ons/hop-ups that you used to because the manufacturers actively discourage it.
You can't work on cars today. The computer world had a similar problem. Apple and others actively discouraged people from cracking open their computers, just like the Honda dealer. But along came the internet and sites like iFixIt.com. They have step by step instructions on how to fix your iPhone, your iPad, and hundreds of other gizmos. They sell the parts and give away the instructions. I replaced the battery on all the iPhones in my family the other day, a highly technical thing Apple actively discourages, and it cost me $19.95 a piece. Where's the iFixIt.com for the car world? Shouldn't Jegs or Summit be all over this, actively instructing people how to hop up their Civic, instead of selling carburetors to old people?
Marketing for whom? Jon is right on some key points though. NHRA needs to decide what it is: is it a business or is it a sanctioning body. It's not clear it can be both. Key to this is that NHRA has to realize that a rising tide raises all boats. It needs to put priority number one making others successful (the track operators, the race teams, the sponsors) and bask in the afterglow of that. This is tough today because NHRA competes with them all by operating their own tracks, selling competing wares, and fighting teams for sponsors. Maybe if NHRA made others more successful at doing those things, and simply took their cut, the whole world of drag racing would be more successful.
Chris
