The Demise Of Class Eliminations

[StockerStang912]

Darren - I do think you make a lot of good points and there should be long-term concern about the viability of performance-based S/SS racing. The reduction of class events to roughly 10% of NHRA national/divisional/open events next year and less than 5% of elimination rounds likely being head-to-head (pure guesstimation) sort of leaves qualifying as the primary vehicle for trying to run fast.

I don't have a solve, but for someone on the young side of the class racer bell curve (I'm 36 and 10 years into S/SS), would strongly push to have more class runoff frequency at divisional or national opens and reduce class count so there's more opportunity for heads-up racing. Associations like CCRA are fantastic and the vast majority of what we've run due to the people and fun factor, but there's still limitation on performance since it's essentially a dial-in program.

There's plenty of younger folks involved in drag racing, and while the participation % of the population is lower than it was 50 years ago, the absolute number is there it's just not active in S/SS or NHRA in general. With multiple other mediums available to race today, it's challenging to convince someone to spend $30K+ on a 11-second Stocker that requires extensive travel to primarily bracket race when they could run 160mph in a dragster or 10s in a Drag N' Drive car.

I love class racing because of the strive for performance and hope to stay involved for the impending future, but do think it's a long transition to pure bracket racing if we don't find more opportunity to generate sustainable head-to-head competition.