Wolf’s Word: Drag Racing – Still A Wonderful, Thriving Sport

Ask any manager, or any customer service or tech support representative, to what degree criticism outpaces praise in their daily interactions with customers and you’re likely to hear the latter distances the former a thousand to one. Few people stand up and commend or compliment when things are going well, but they waste little time in being critical when they aren’t. And so it goes in the motorsports world, which, to be fair, has given journalists and every-day ticket buyers good reason to publicly critique it over the last quarter century.

But, if we’re going to be so quick to make judgement on the failures, the shortcomings, the mistakes, and overall trajectory of something, I believe we should also endorse the positives of racing when it’s warranted, as well. And, in my mind, there’s still plenty about our sport to be excited about.

…in my mind, there’s still plenty about our sport to be excited about.

Every industry, be it financial, industrial, entertainment, whatever it may be, has it’s own metrics to analyze and determine its overall health and strength. And drag racing, and in a broader scope, the performance aftermarket as a whole, are no different. And if we really drill down and look at our sport and this industry from the right perspective, things aren’t what they’ve been made out to be.

Are there fewer racetracks, or at least financially stable racetracks, dotting the American landscape today than 40 or 50 years ago? Certainly that’s true. There also aren’t 64-car nitro Funny Car shows anymore, car counts and fans are fewer and further between across the board, sponsor dollars are increasingly harder to come by, and the NHRA, despite the best television package in its history, isn’t the fledgling operation it once was. Indeed, these are criticisms, but they’re also facts. And they have, throughout the years, been duly noted, in magazine columns, message boards, social media, and around campfires in the pit area.

But let’s look at the other side of the coin here.

Today, there are men like Steve Petty, Josh Ledford, Patrick Barnhill, and Shane Tecklenburg who are making a full-time living — and a good one at that — traveling the world lending their tuning services to race teams. There are young twenty-somethings making full-time careers of prepping race tracks and even promoting world-class racing events. There are organizations like the PDRA, the ADRL, the NMCA, and the NMRA, that didn’t even exist 25 years ago, that have and continue to serve as a home for thousands of racers.

…while the landscape doesn’t look just like it did 20, 30, or 40 years ago, the old ticker is still pumping plenty of lifeblood through this sport.

Engine and chassis builders continue to churn out high-dollar machinery day in and day out, and a group of men in Oklahoma City are living the dream after quitting their full-time jobs to star in a television show and travel the country racing in front of their fans. Photographers and videographers have successfully made drag racing their sole source of income. Operations overseas have invested millions in American drag racing in recent years, and even given every-man racers like Frankie Taylor, Joey Martin, Terry Schweigert, and Alex Hossler the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to race abroad.

One-time street racers are competing for six-figure paychecks in front of tens of thousands of fans in no prep events, achieving a level of fame that far exceeds their former ‘wanted’ status by the local police. Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler have brought back the factory muscle car wars of yesteryear with their factory-built race cars that continually sell out with every production run. Television networks are jumping on the wagon with ‘House of Grudge’, ‘Grudge Race’, PINKS: All Out, Street Outlaws, and, of course, the NHRA Mello Yello, Lucas Oil, and Pro Mod series.

Entire genres of the sport — fresh new categories that hadn’t even been conceived just a few short years ago — have infused fresh enthusiasm into drag racing and created an entire subset of the industry all on its own — chassis shops, power adder manufacturers, and so on. Bracket racing, in some regions of the country, is stronger than it’s ever been before, and the money they compete for, too, is on the rise. Young millennial-aged men — considered a lost generation with no interest in the car culture, are building everything from 2,000 horsepower Lamborghini’s for roll races, to four-second Fox bodies to grudge race, to early model classics to run Drag Week.

We have five-second imports, Drag Radial cars, and even street cars. And we have 330 mph Top Fuel Dragsters and Funny Cars — doing so in 320 fewer feet than was traditional.

Exhibitor space at the industry’s two primary expositions, SEMA in Las Vegas and PRI in Indianapolis, continue to overflow their halls and their waiting lists, with manufacturers the world over insisting they’re as busy as ever — one manufacturer representative telling me a couple of years ago that sales are so strong he “doesn’t even know where all of the product goes.”

The participants are out there, they just aren’t in the same place they might’ve been found a generation ago.

And untrained journalists like myself, who may have never had a chance in this industry decades ago, get to wake up every day and write about it.

So, it’s difficult to say that drag racing and the industry that created it are in some kind of dire straits. Because the truth of the matter is that while the landscape doesn’t look just like it did 20, 30, or 40 years ago, the old ticker is still pumping plenty of lifeblood through this sport. Organizations, genres, classes, and opportunities that never existed at one time are now there for the taking. Things that had disappeared have returned.

In June of last year, I penned a column entitled ‘Drag Racing – The Sport Of Opportunity’, which delved into the fact that, from a participant standpoint, the numbers haven’t necessarily diminished, but rather, the sport has fractured beyond any measure one could have foreseen many years ago. While the NHRA is seeing fewer competitors in both its professional and sportsman eliminators these days (in some cases, sharply fewer), on any given weekend, there may be a hundred Pro Mods, a couple hundred more Drag Radial cars, and a handful of Fuel Altereds and old school Gassers competing at venues around the country. The participants are out there, they just aren’t in the same place they might’ve been found a generation ago.

It’s not all roses, but drag racing is and always has been a wonderful and thriving sport. You just have to look around.