Scott Gardner: We remain an entertainment-driven company, but we need to remember to include our competitive side and all of our customers. So the vision is to grow the business. And that means more racers, more member tracks, more sponsors, more events. But we need to do it smartly. That means understanding what we’re doing before we jump and not putting something out there that hasn’t been researched so we know what will work in [that] market.

DZ: Racing ultimately is entertainment, but racers and fans have a yearning for real racing.

SG: Absolutely. And our formula is to tweak the model that IHRA has been running under the past number of years, under the past two ownerships, of more just strictly an entertainment-type event. We believe to not only be recognized nationally [with] media attention as well as sponsor and fan attention, we need to have competitive racing. That is why we moved to a more of a competitive format.

But we can’t just flip a switch and turn it into 1995 again or 2000. We have to walk before we run. We have to make sure our product is affordable to the race fan, that we don’t raise the cost with so many classes and purses that it’s very hard for a regular person to go see our event. We have to be very strategic when it comes to planning things out and knowing exactly what we’re putting out. That way we have a good entertainment package that’s affordable.

DZ: We keep hearing that “Sportsman racing is No. 1,” and that’s certainly the direction the IHRA has gone recently. But if so, how do you balance that with building the IHRA back into . . . maybe not a pro-driven organization but a “real racing” program?

SG: This is how I look at that: the foundation of the IHRA is the sportsman racer and the member tracks. That’s the foundation. And you have to have a strong foundation to be able to build from that into these other things. Then you can have a line out that’s your sponsors and the people who come and want to be involved because you have this foundation.

Then you have this other line that comes out of your base that is your national events. The competitive side of that is added to it. And then your third line out from that is, in our case, our Sonic Rush Tour, which are more “Night Of Fire”-type events with the jets cars and the monster-eating dinosaurs. But with that [last] series, it has to be an inexpensive night for a family of four.

So that’s really the model that we look at. You can’t have a crack in your base or the other things aren’t going to work at all. You have to be assured your sportsman racing is in place and your member tracks are strong. And from there you can build these other cores off the main base. We can’t take our eye off that base, because that’s what drives our company. And we need to continue to grow those numbers of our sportsman racers and their programs as well as our member tracks.

DZ: Are those things mutually exclusive? Does something have to give? Can you have both at the same event?

SG: At times you can do that. We have our Nitro Jam events that have sportsman racing. The problem would be if we grew our professional side so large that it takes over the entire event or a huge portion of it and the sportsman racers get pushed back. We don’t want to do that. Our model is that when the feature cars run, when the pro cars run, that’s during our feature time of the event. They run on a competitive format. But there’s also time for the sportsman guys, and not two days before or a day after. They’re included with the event. In certain markets, we do more sportsman racing than others because the facilities are set up or the market is better for that type of things than others. We have to look at it on an individual basis, on what market we go into.

DZ: Your Nitro Funny Cars are nostalgia cars, essentially, right?

SG: We’re not really using the word “nostalgia.” In some context people use that as a negative, and it really shouldn’t be. Over the years, I’ve been heavily involved with the nitro – as you would say, nostalgia – Funny Cars, and there’s really not a whole lot “nostalgia” about them. If the fans come out and watch those cars race, the first thing that comes to their mind isn’t going to be “That’s a nostalgia car” when they’ve got flames shooting out with nitro. Their body styles might be retro, but they run and perform moderately very, very fast – faster than they did back in the days they ran those cars. So for us, we look at it as our nitro Funny Car class. Is it the same as NHRA’s nitro Funny Car? No. Is it the same as an Alcohol Funny Car? No. It’s just IHRA Nitro Funny Car. It’s different than everybody else’s.

DZ: So it’s a bit of a hybrid, then.

SG: Yeah, basically. There’s just a lot of interest in these cars and while racing on this level is very, very expensive, it’s at least attainable for a reasonable amount of people who want to go racing this way.

DZ: Everything is quarter-mile, correct?

SG: We race everything quarter-mile. The fact we’re not running 340 miles an hour, we can still put on a great show with nitro racing that’s side by side and really have some qualities that the other Funny Car classes in other associations have. Our qualities are more entertaining and more interesting to watch in a lot cases. And we can be at the traditional quarter-mile racing. Drag racing’s always been a quarter-mile.  That’s how it was born.

DZ: Even the late Wally Parks, founder of the NHRA, said he recognized the sport is rather complicated.

SG: When you get into the sportsman ranks and you’ve got all the index classes and all their index stuff and records, it can get very confusing. You have to be pretty much a rulebook junkie to figure that stuff out. I’ve always thought that drag racing has too many classes. Now, does that mean we’re going to go out and cut classes out of the IHRA? No, that doesn’t mean that. But before we would add any more sportsman classes, we’d have to look very, very closely at the model and what we’re doing.

Running racetracks, I had all kinds of groups come to me and say, ‘We want to get involved and do a race at your track.” And they had seven classes they’re going to run. I said, “How many people are going to run?” They said, “Oh, we’re going to have over 100 cars!” Then you go to the event, and pretty soon there’s three cars in this class, five cars in that class, and it’s like it just doesn’t work out. There’s so many variables and so many ways people can look at to build these things. You can have a million classes if you want, but that doesn’t work for anybody and it’s very hard to understand.

The one error that was probably made in drag racing a long, long time ago was that there were just too many classes. But at this point, when you have people who are operating and racing these classes, there isn’t any way you’re going to take stuff away from them. But the thing is, before you would build or add a new class you’d have to look hard at it to see if there’s interest and has a mass appeal to it. You just don’t want to come up with a class because you came up with an idea. If you’re going to have new classes, they have to be marketable to a lot of people.

DZ: Let’s talk about Mountain Motor Pro Stock. It seems the Pro Stock class has had a tough time “finding” itself.

SG: I would agree that the Pro Stock thing has ebbed and flowed over the years. When I was growing up, Lee Shepherd and Bob Glidden [were racing] on the NHRA side and on the IHRA side it was the first guys to run in the seven seconds, because they had the Mountain Motor cars. There was a lot more interest in Pro Stock than there might be today. And you really see that when you go [to the races] or watch on TV, that people really leave the grandstands when the cars are running. And part of that is because the cars became such cookie-cutter cars that people don’t really recognize the difference between one and the other. It takes the fun out of the racing side of it.

What I believe we have with the IHRA Mountain Motor Pro Stock deal is, one, we have faster cars, which generally is more interesting for people to watch, and two, with the IHRA model of Mountain Motor, we have a little bit better broad spectrum of cars and models. You have more GM cars, you have more Ford cars, you have more Mopar cars – instead of 80 percent of them being GM cars. That’s important, because that helps market and make the event more exciting and popular to the fans. It’s not all the same body style running exactly the same numbers and nobody can figure out what the hell’s the difference between that one and this one and this one. That’s kind of what we bring to the board. It’s exciting to me to have them back with us here at IHRA.

DZ: It brings back the rivalries again.

SG: Exactly. Back in the day, they’d do a match race. The crowds loved it and showed up for it. It was all about the rivalry. It mattered that they had different brands. Their personalities played out, as well. That’s what we need more of in racing today.  

DZ: You hinted at something: tradition.

SG: Tradition is a big deal. That’s a big deal with the Pro Stock guys. They’re looking for a home base. They know the IHRA is where they were born and was their home for a lot of years.

The two parties working together – the drivers and the sanctioning body – and both coming to the table to make this thing work is really how you build for the next level. They know that they have a place to race – 10 races in 2014 and, hopefully, races in ’15 and ’16 and ’17 and all the way out. But you have to walk before you can run in bringing that class back. We’re excited. We think it’s marketable in the venues and markets we go to.

DZ: What’s the status of the Pro Mod class at the IHRA?

SG: That’s an interesting question. Pro Mod is a tough one right now, because of what’s going on in the marketplace. We don’t want to cloud that up any more than it is. So we’re just kind of watching and seeing what happens and what ultimately ends up happening. If we jump in the middle of it right now, it would just make it worse.

At this point, the dust needs to settle. We need to see who’s there and who’s not there and what kind of interest there is. If we were to take something like that on, we would have to have the sponsorship dollars behind us to do that. Also, we would have to do that in markets we feel it would work well. Again, it’s not like flipping a switch. There’s a lot in with that that you’ve got to consider before you just say, “Hey, we’ll run Pro Mods.” There’s purses. They’re expensive cars to run. There’s track-prep issues with those types of cars because of the power they make. There’s just all those kinds of things.

If there’s an opportunity, by all means, we could be interested in that. But let’s just see where it goes first. Right now if I was a Pro Mod racer, I’d be pulling my hair out because I’d be so dang nervous about if, when, or where I’d be racing next year. That’s a tough scenario for those guys to be in. [Re ADRL and the defunct X-DRL] I think both groups got after each other, as far as raising the bar, and ultimately it hurt both of them. One of ‘em’s totally gone, and the other one’s on life support. That speaks for itself.

DZ: Where are your purses coming from?

SG: On the pro level, most of the purses come right out of the funds. As specific to Pro Stock, they came to the table with some funding, as we brought some. We each brought value to the plan to make it work. That’s the only way, with a void of sponsorship in that category. Obviously, the IHRA hasn’t been actively pursuing Pro Stock sponsors. Then 30 days ago, when they approached me and said, ‘”Hey, we’d like to run at your events,” there was really no way to go out and get a sponsor put together in a few weeks’ time. So the general consensus is, “They want to race.

We’ve got a place where they can race. We would like to have them. They would like to be with us. They’ll bring some funding, some value into the program. We’ll bring some value into the program. And we just pool our resources together and continue to work as a team on finding major sponsorship for their class for 2015 and ’16 and ’17. If there was extra money there, the IHRA would have put Pro Stock back in a long time ago. There’s not those dollars there. It takes participation from both sides to make that work.

DZ: So for right now, they’re paying to play?

SG: I like to look at it as we both brought resources in. They brought some money into the deal. If we had to operate off just the money they brought to our table, we couldn’t run those cars down the track. It’s more than just the purses. There’s other things to consider, other costs to consider from our standpoint. There’s track prep, tech people required, tech equipment required, another trailer and support people to go to the event, and so on. It’s costs on our side, which a lot of people don’t always look at. They just take a purse and they go, “Well, this is what it costs to run that class.” Well, not really. Your insurance changes. Your built-in house expenses change. You have other things you have to achieve now because you have those things running.

If you’re going to do it right, there’s going to be expenses set forth and there’s a cost TO you. We believe and we pray that we’re going to get more people and more fans interested in coming to our events now because we now have this class. Then that falls back on us on the promotional side and the marketing of it. We have to go out there and market it properly and get people excited to come out and watch. If we don’t market it and we don’t get people interested and excited about it, why are we even racing it? It doesn’t make any sense if we have it all paid for, if it doesn’t add anything to our entertainment package.

Regardless of comparisons with the NHRA or any other sanctioning body, Gardner spoke confidently about the IHRA’s newly refocused course.

“We’re in the business of entertainment and competitive drag racing. Entertainment through drag racing is the way to say it. So if [the NHRA] is out presenting A, B, C, and D, we probably want E, F, G, and H. There’s so many styles and abilities within our industry and our sport. We’ve come up with our own model of racing our own classes with our jet dragsters, our unique Mountain Motor Pro Stocks coming back, our style of Funny Car and what they bring to the table with different look and different styles and personalities, a whole bunch more players who are going to be involved, and our Fuel Altereds, which are pretty much exclusive to our type of racing. And even if we were in the same market, our events are dramatically different.

It’s apples and oranges – which are equally attractive, equally tasty, equally satisfying. They just taste different.

“Actually,” Gardner said with a laugh, “ours tastes the best.”