DRO: Aren’t these engines closer to 10,000 horsepower than the estimated 7,000 or 8,000 horsepower that is publicized?
DO: Probably.
DRO: So it’s setting up limitations on power while keeping in mind what that does to the racing budget?
DO: Right. Basically what’s happened is we’ve driven up the cost per run… probably doubled it, might even be more. Before we were getting maybe 15 runs off of a crankshaft, now we are getting four to seven runs. On the rods we were having to cycle rods out after 20 or 25 runs. You just throw them out. Now I’m not saying you get that kind of life out of every rod, but most guys were capable of getting many runs out of a set of rods, and pistons were lasting a long time.
DRO: So that’s freezing out the smaller teams?
DO: Absolutely. Soon we are not going to have anyone out here but Schumacher, Kalitta and Torco cars. Bernstein makes his living from racing, Prudhomme makes his living by racing and there’s only a handful of these guys left. But eventually they aren’t going to take money out of their wallet. The biggest thing we have to do is -- it’s not just me -- but as a group, this is the direction we need to go to get the costs back down. Trust me, when the costs keep where it is right now, look at it a year from now and instead of twenty teams out here it’ll keep shrinking.
DRO: To eight-car fields?
DO: Yes, you can see for yourself in the past 20 years you used to see 25 to 30 cars out here at Pomona not too many years ago. We used to have a lot of local, southern California people come out here to race, but not any more. Mike Chrisman is about the only one, he was the only one that I can think of. And that’s not good for the sport because we won’t have a sport, then pretty quick you’ll have six cars showing up all owned by one team owner, and they don’t want that, nobody wants that.
You know 25 or 30 years ago if you worked you could afford to have a Top Fuel car. My first Top Fuel car, my wife worked and I worked, and I took my money and went racing on it. You can’t even think about doing that now. And you didn’t have to win to support it either. We’d run a few rounds and with a little help you could run a Top Fuel car, but that’s back when we had 150 cars. You could run at Irwindale, Long Beach another night, Carlsbad another night, but those were the good old days you know. If we are not careful, I mean us, I’m talking about everybody as a group, pretty quick it will be so expensive and do so much damage that if you don’t have brand new fresh parts for every run you aren’t going to be competitive. That’s when it will go back to the Forces and the Schumachers who’ll be the only guys who can afford to race.
DRO: Do you have a pretty good idea of the direction you want to go with changes?
DO: Yeah, I’ve got a good sense, but what I’m going to do is sit down with the Coils, the Fedderlys, Alan Johnson, Cerney, but sit down and talk to everybody, after we talk to come up a group of people with a direction, to say OK, let’s test this or go in this direction. But you know it’s just like running a car: we make this change, but you don’t think well **** it changed this also. What I’m saying is we need to make it a change, that we can make it in a direction we can continue with, to think about it enough to be sure we don’t get ourselves into a worse situation than we already are now.
DRO: Is this something you will try to implement before the new season?
DO: I think it would probably be pretty hard to do before then, but the sooner we get going and can implement it at any given time, it’s got to happen is a short period of time. Whether it’s 85% or 90%, we have to do it.
DRO: The Goodyear tires have caught back up?
DO: Yes the tires are good, they are pretty darn safe. We are not having any issues and most teams are not having any issues, so I think the tire is there. We don’t need to get back into that either. A problem with the tire only happens when we have an extremely good condition like we had Thursday and Friday. . .you know, night conditions. The tires on the whole as far as I know are really good, I mean everything looks good.
I'm curious how many races if any you all go to every year? Complaining about a sport you don't support makes no sense IMO!
