The NHRA And "Pitstop Envy"
(or: Why Some People Wish Jeff Gordon Drove A Pro Stock)
Rather than limit this to rants and tirades, some of which are meaningful, and some of which are... less meaningful, I decided that this should probably be a collection of long and short bits updated more than once every calendar year. It remains to be seen if there's actually enough to make this a separate Section, but what the heck, right?
Just in case you hadn't noticed, most every racing Series is now plagued with what I think of as the
"Invasion of the Driver Clones." Perfectly wonderful, totally inoffensive, moderately young drivers with
lots of talent and the ability to attract and retain sponsorship by impressing the **** out of the sponsors,
not necessarily the customers. Other than NASCAR, however, what seems to be lacking is some form
of passionate relationship between the drivers and their fans. You can basically write off Indycar and
IRL racing on this scale, and a standing joke in professional road racing is that the crowds are so small
the spectators introduce themselves to the drivers, rather than vice versa. Formula One, the motorsports
version of Brazilian soccer riots, is currently off the American radar screen, but is due to be reintroduced
at Indy by none other than our wonderful buddy Bernie Ecclestone and his new best friend, Tony George
(the same hitter who gave us the wildly successful IRL).
So, what, you may be wondering, does this have to do with drag racing and our little friends in
Glendora? Glad you asked. Do a little addition and subtraction with me here. Close your eyes, count
to a few, say four or five, years, and tell me what professional drag racing will look like from a personality
point of view. Subtract Winston money and add back in a shorter-term sponsor, say, an alcoholic beverage
perhaps, with a much shorter length of relationship, equally deep pockets, and some passing interest in drag
racing's functional demographics. Now start subtracting people. Remove Force, Bernstein, Amato, Hoffman,
the elder Johnson, and those of a similar age from the picture. What do you have left?
A whole bunch of smiling, eager faces who repeat memorized sponsor lists and drag racing clichés with
such stunning similarity you feel like barfing. You want a sanitized media product? You got it! And since
you can count on the fingers of one hand all the publications not owned by the NHRA that seriously cover
drag racing and still have some left over to hold the remote control, what you see is going to be a vast
majority of what you get. And what you get is going to be marketable, bunkie, or he/she simply won't be
there.
Uh, you're thinking, how about those skills necessary to drive all that stuff? The gene pool is still there;
the skimming will just come from a different edge of the pond (look, if they can teach serious egos with
good motor skills how to make an F-14 not fall out of the sky in something approaching a year, they
can develop a Super Comp driver into a Fuel shoe. In case you doubt that, try figuring out Kenji Okazaki's
strong cultural background in drag racing, or Doug Kalitta's wealth of Top Fuel experience prior to '98.
So where does Jeff Gordon come in to all of this?
Age and personality, manufactured and sanitized or not. Face it, as a marketable commodity, little Jeff
has umpteen years left in his career, baring unforeseen accidents. A sizable crowd turns on a NASCAR
race simply to watch and pray that some good soul put him into the wall. But they tune in. And they know
names and car numbers and owners and crew chiefs and sponsors and, and, and... It's a passion for the
sport, the spectacle, whatever you want to call it - but it always involves the drivers, because NASCAR
fans have, for want of a better term, relationships with drivers, remote though they may be.
NASCAR realized a long time ago that the best commodity it had to promote was a large number of distinct
individuals (and their accompanying personalities) thrown together in competition as close as they could make
it. From the perspective of what the "show" means, the cars are actually secondary, ready-reference labels
for those who care. Think that's ********? Put Gordon in a Ford with Ray on the wall in front of Hendrick
money and assets and the results would be similar. Fans would change sides (after the Ford guys got off their
knees thanking God for His blessings), and maybe the boo-to-cheer ratio would change a bit. But the fans
wouldn't disappear and the same (or greater) number of people would tune in to see what happened.
Contrast that with the NHRA approach, where "the car is king." Top Fuel still gets top billing because, well,
it pretty much makes the most noise and goes the fastest, despite what spectators and viewers may want
(hey, don't ask me). If you need a quick reading of where the NHRA demographics are and may be going,
count the number of major non-automotive sponsors still appearing on Top Fuel, Funny Car, Pro Stock, and
Pro Stock Truck. If you need a quick reading on name recognition, ask a non-racing-involved friend to name
some current pro drag racing drivers (hint: at least 60 of them qualified in TF, FC, and PS alone, not to
mention those who missed the cut). And if you need a reading on how many of the countless bracket racers in
the country will migrate to faster, more expensive Classes, think about what Junior Dragster was really
designed to do.
So what does all of this mean? It means that the NHRA, a for-profit entity, knows that money rules the
world, the world revolves around TV, and that their hard-core audience, never that big to begin with, is
growing older and less demographically desirable (us old guys don't switch brands easily enough, no matter
how much money we have, and tend to develop brand loyalties that make product managers just a little bit
nuts). They see these guys on the other side of the country coining money, but really can't create drag racing
all over again without alienating a bunch of competitors who help pay a lot of the bills. I figure what they're
going to do is what any single-line business faced with the possibility of declining sales in a cash cow does
(before, of course, they either call in the turnaround specialists or dump it on some other unsuspecting fools):
change the formula a little bit, scream "New and Improved" at the top of their lungs, and repackage the ****
out of it. So what do you end up with?
A larger number of shorter "National" events ("If NASCAR can do it, we can do it") comprised of four or five
Classes - hello trucks, goodbye Sportsman racing - slightly higher ticket prices (hey, people wait for years for
the privilege of buying NFL season tickets, and you know what they cost), which helps make the
demographic numbers look better, and a tighter TV package that features sort of familiar stuff driven by guys
who look like a cross between Tony Stewart (you do know what he looks like, don't you?) and someone
from the cast of Party of Five. Hey, it'll look just like real drag racing, only "better!"
I can hardly wait.
Am I the only drag racing fan who really enjoys watching new Pro Stock Firebirds getting beat by used
Oldsmobiles?
Whining & Sniveling classes?
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