I will finaly make a commet, I have been involved in drag racing promotion and advertising since 1964. I worked for Mickey Thompson as he PR guy from 1965 to 1969, he was my mentor and educator. I went on to promote several major companies with some pretty good results. Prior to M/T I worked with NHRA developing regional points events. I was at the 1st SEMA show and have been involved at several levels over the last 40 years. That is a mini resume. I think I know what I am talking about. I hope that sets the picture. NHRA has is the basis of drag racing as we know it , NASCAR is the stock car version . Wally Parks had a vision to take drag racing off the street and put it into a structured program , off the street , on airports and eventurally dedicated drag strips. I knew him pretty well, he really did not care what class the cars ran in, he just wanted them all contained in a safe off street location.
As the sport grew Wally let to expand without restriction. NHRA grew from a part time enterprise to a full scale business.
Sure things have changed since Wally passed away, the current administration has actually done a good job in my opionion ( if that is not the case please show me another organization that has had the success and provided the racers more in the form of purse and safe venues to race at) Many "shots' of the executive compensation have shown up in blogs everywhere. The NHRA has revenues in the low hundred of million dolllars, Tom Compton has a compsenation plan of approx $700,000.00 per year. That may sound like a lot of money, but almost all normal companies that have gross revenues in that amount pay thier CEOs in excess of that. Who cares, as long as he is running the association in a possitive manner. Do not think I think NHRA is perfect .
I think one of the biggest problem that they are still trying to play the same music as they did in the 60s. Maybe the elimination ladder system is obsolete. I can not imagine many areas of entertainment, where paying customers would tolerate 3 days , or more, of thier time and money, to wait for a final day where one half of the entertainers run off the stage after the 1st performance, nowhere I know of. Sure the two days of qualifing is exicting and getting to snort nitro during warmups has no comparables. But maybe, just maybe the time has come to compress the progam to two days, with a remodeled final day. I always use the example of: A family or four travels 200 miles to a National event, spending approx $1,000 ( travel costs , hotel. tickets, food, etc), then they find that there hero , ( John Foce or whoever) does not qualify or gets beat in round one. That is a lot of entertainment dollar or maybe 20 minutes of targeted entertainment. Imagine if half the field at the Daytona 500 crashes in lap one, 10 more in lap 3 and so on. They would not have 20 fans in the seats after lap 5 and those that left would never return.
Maybe a time for a remodel. but for the time being the NHRA program is by far the best offered.
Maybe those that are so negative should put there money where there mouth is an provide an alternative. There are plenty of class venues that are not affiliates available.... Go For It. NHRA has no restrictions on thier competitors as to running other events ( other than testing regs) Do it , promote it and if sucessuful you will prevail. Sorry for the length
