Dragzine

One of the great things about drag racing is that it’s really easy and cheap to do. Well, at least at first, that is. While all it takes to go out and bracket race is a car that’s not currently on fire and maybe a helmet if it’s quick enough, once you decide to go heads-up racing, the cost jumps exponentially. One of the big challenges facing racing organizations is how to convert those grassroots racers in the local bracket ranks into full fields for their heads-up classes, and the parts manufacturers who support those organizations with advertising dollars would love to see more racing where speed (and therefore money spent on parts), not consistency, wins trophies.

While it’s possible to spend an arbitrary amount of money drag racing if you want to go the Pro Mod or Outlaw 10.5 route, what’s the bare minimum cost of entry for heads-up racing? You’re probably looking at $25k for a competitive car, about that much again for a trailer and something to pull it, and perhaps two grand an event for fuel, maintenance, entrance fees, food, hotel, and what have you for an ‘entry level’ class. It’s no stretch at all to put the better part of $75,000 into your first year of heads-up racing. That’s a lot of discretionary income to pour into one hobby, for sure, and it’s hard to come up with a way to drop the cost below that and still win races.

There's no problem filling the lanes for bracket and index classes, but getting those racers to graduate to a heads-up class is an elusive goal.

ProMedia’s PRO series tried to find a solution to the problem with the Cheap Street class, which debuted in 2003 and specified small-block V8’s with flat-top pistons, a narrow approved list of unported heads, flat tappet cams, and spec-jet single stage nitrous systems. Most interesting was the claimer rule, adapted from similar practice in the circle track world – The top eight qualifiers at a race could put cash on the barrelhead at the end of the weekend and buy the engine, transmission, or carb right out from under the winner or runner-up. Under the initial rules, a long block was worth $3000, a transmission and converter $2000, and a carb had a price tag of $500, with a limit of one claim per year, per component category.

The idea was to make building an expensive class-killer motor a risky proposition, because anyone who could get into the top eight (and light fields made that an easy task) and come up with the cash would simply take it away from you. Unfortunately, racers hated it, and complained until the claimer rule was dropped at the end of the first season. By 2005 the class was dead and replaced with Street Race, which had its own wacky weight adder rule that penalized event winners with an additional 20 pounds for the rest of the season. Per the press release from ProMedia’s VP of Events, Charlie Harmon, “Although it was a popular concept with spectators, the racer turnout with the existing rules in Cheap Street continued to struggle in 2004. We had a very hard time developing the class as an entry level eliminator, and this was a hard decision to have to move in a different direction. As there seemed to be no easy way to salvage the original class, we worked hand in hand with Car Craft Magazine to re-develop Cheap Street into Car Craft Street Race, a category we can now truly say is the ultimate real-world street car class.” Needless to say, Street Race was also short-lived, and the successor in the NMCA series today is Street Radial – hardly an “entry level” class, with cars running 8.70’s.

Steve Fulgham (in the near lane) and Rick Hatch are the guys to beat in PSCA Street Challenge. Unfortunately, they're about the only guys in the class, too.

A similar experiment in the process of failing is PSCA’s Street Challenge class. As originally conceived, SC was intended to be a heads-up category for real street cars on real street tires – P255/60R15, 180 or better treadwear, and no drag radials or road race tires. After a ton of interest at the first few events, it became clear that the class would be dominated by just a couple of cars, and as of today you better be able to run 9.90’s in the mid-140’s if you want to win.

Street Challenge is a perfect example of what happens when you make the rules less restrictive to try and throw a net over the largest number of potential competitors (and Street Challenge has almost none, other than the tire size; cars are limited to a single power adder and aren’t weighed). Though you might have a bigger pool of people who are eligible to race in the class, only a small range of the possible combinations will actually stand a chance at winning, and a lack of stability in the rules means that nobody’s going to risk purpose-building a car for the class when it’s likely that the rug will get pulled out from under them next season. Ask anyone who used to run NDRA or NHRASC about it, and they’ll agree that rules chasing cars (rather than the other way around) is one of the major reasons the Sport Compact racing bubble popped.

Factory Stock might be the NMRA's "entry level" heads-up class, but it's not cheap by any standard.

If fewer rules don’t work to bring down the cost of racing, you might be tempted to say the answer is a more restrictive rulebook. But a look at NMRA Factory Stock and NMCA Mean Street, both series’ entry-level naturally aspirated classes, will tell you that unless you want to be an also-ran, it’s going to take some serious money. Limitations on engine and drivetrain components mean that they’re always getting pushed to the breaking point and beyond, and if you intend to campaign in these classes you better budget for multiple replacement clutches, transmissions, and valvetrain components. Then there’s the fact that tight, strictly-enforced limits on major parts mean that you’ll be spending more money and time on the minor ones that aren’t closely specified in the rulebook, in search of any tiny advantage you can find.

It’s no wonder that alternate racing formats like “True Street” have become popular recently – they offer the trappings of a heads-up tree and no breakouts, without actually being real drag racing. There are no eliminations, and everybody gets their three runs in “competition” no matter what. But even there, with only bragging rights on the line, there’s still an arms race, and unless you want to spend a lot of money, you’re going to have to settle for an index trophy rather than the overall win.

I don’t know what the answer is – if I did, I’d be consulting out to every doorslammer series in the country at $500 an hour. I do know what the answer isn’t, though, and I can make a pretty good list of things that doom affordable racing. Rules that are too broad, to include every car possible (but ensure that most aren’t even close to competitive). Rules that change so quickly that nobody can be guaranteed a car built now will be legal, let alone a frontrunner, in six months. Asking racers with day jobs to travel more than 6-8 hours each way. Contingency sponsors that pay in discount coupons, or checks that arrive just in time to be included in your estate. But most importantly, treating the slower classes like nothing but filler to kill time while the “pro” racers get their cars turned around for the next pass. It’s important to remember that drag racing is nothing more than entertainment for everyone involved, and there are plenty of fun ways to burn tens of thousands of dollars a year if racers don’t think they’re getting value for their money.