Joe, I like you, but your slamming attitude towards older fans of drag racing is just as lame (bad) as
us geezers who DID attend drag racing in the 60's, 70's and 80's. I'm part of THAT group and if I'm not mistaken, you ARE a geezer too, at least by AGE. Why you didn't start attending drag races until you were approx 30 yrs old makes
YOU the odd man out in this argument. Some of us GREW UP with drag racing unlike YOU. I was attending drag racing events at Beeline Dragway (AHRA Winternationals) years before I could drive a car. I used to pedal my Schwinn StingRay approx 10 miles one way just to see the funny cars I read about in Car Craft, Hot Rod, and especially Super Stock & Drag Illustrated heading to the track on their ramp trucks. I learned that the racers loved to stop for breakfast at a restaurant in Scottsdale Rd. & McDowell in Scottsdale and while the teams were inside fueling their stomachs, I along with my younger brother and another friend would be climbing on the ramp trucks and taking pictures of the cars that I had only seen in magazines. I wish I still had all those old pictures taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera (pitiful), but unlike Whit Bazemore, I didn't preserve that part of my history. My father finally relented one year and took my older brother and I to the AHRA Winternationals one time, and it was like NIRVANA. Unlike us kids, my father WAS a photographer and had a professional camera, a LEICA, with several lenses. He put himself through college as a photographer and never lost his love for it. He took the most amazing pictures of all the cars at Beeline that one year he took us, and those pictures would be worth some money right now, but in multiple moves they ended up getting trashed by my parents since they did not appreciate the value of them. I should have absconded with them when I was still living at home and kept them for safe keeping but didn't. The same thing happened to the model car collection that my brother and I built of 1960's Funny Cars that were stored and saved in boxes in our bedroom closets. Those model cars were one-off replicas of Dyno Don Nicholson's Eliminator II flip-top Mercury Comet and one of Gene Snow's early
Rambunctious Funny Cars before corporate sponsorship by Revell. Also, there were a couple unnamed and unlettered Funny Cars that were just too beautiful to ruin the Candy Metallic paint jobs with sponsor decals and were not replicas of any car so they remained un-named. So, in a nutshell, I like others, grew up with the sport of Drag Racing, pre-NHRA only corporate racing, and I can speak from authority and fact since I lived it, that THOSE DAYS were awesome!! And, I even pursued Drag Racing as a hobby for several years. Have you? I lived and breathed drag racing up until about 1981 when I decided to go back to college and get my Bachelor's degree so I could hopefully make a decent income and afford an expensive hobby like drag racing. I never went back to doing it, even though I was successful at bracket racing my home-built 327ci 1965 Nova Super Sport. It was a strip-only car with a rear gear ratio in a Ford 9-inch that made it barely streetable. I couldn't afford a trailer or a decent tow vehicle so I flat-towed it to Beeline and SpeedWorld drag strips in the Phoenix area behind my daily driver. I even tasted victory at Beeline Dragway a couple times and once had the trophies to prove it, but those also went out with the garbage during one of my parents moves. So, now I'm Just-A-Fan like you, and not even as BIG a fan as you, since I don't spend most of my disposable income flying to NHRA races around the country to sit and watch the dwindling crop of bought-in drivers for multi-million dollar team owners. And that is NOT a slam against John Force, or Don Schumacher, or Connie Kallitta, etc. I appreciate them doing what they are doing for the most part. I'm not a doom-and-gloom person either, but if you can't see how NHRA might be in trouble when the BIGGEST current star of NHRA Drag Racing, John Force, is losing FORD and CASTROL at the same time in 2014, I think it is YOU that has your head stuck in the sand. And YES I know that the current reality for ALL motorsports and sponsorship is getting tougher every year, and I wish it wasn't so. I too love the sport of Drag Racing passionately, but it hurts to watch it go down the tubes incrementally every year. NHRA needs to "think outside the box", and not like what IHRA did, but get some passionate CAR people in key positions that also have great vision and leadership skills. More Bean Counters and Suits ain't gonna cut it. Not now and not ever.
