Originally Posted by bill dedman
I remember running off national records and for awhile, it worked.
Remember; this was a simpler time before ten thousand ****house lawyers disguised as racers started doing things to screw up the system... but it DID work for awhile.
That in no way is intended to mean that it can work now, however.
It worked then for several reasons that don't apply, today.
1. National records back then were held in high esteem by racers everywhere. If you held the record, you probably were the baddest of ther bad in the whole country, and you probably traveled hundreds of miles to get to a track where a record could be set. It was a BIG DEAL to hold a national record. Cam grinders advertised it; racers painted it on their car "NHRA NATIONAL RECORD HOLDER," usually above the door/drip rail; You had the respect of everybody, nationwide, who ran that class. Competitors spoke your name in hushed tones...
Really.
2. It was SUCH a big deal that at least, in the beginning, NOBODY sandbagged to install a national record that was "soft," because somebody else would come along and nail it for themeslves. Everybody who COULD, tried to set that record as low as they could so it would remain theirs; that's why it was the record... it showed who was F-A-ST!!!
3. You weren't penalized by a cockamaymie system that rewarded your efforts at going faster with bestowing horsepower on your engine; it stayed where it was. Performance was king... and, the science that provided that performance was the brainchild of the racers of that period of time who could generate lower e.t.'s through their own intelligent thought, inventiveness, clever engineering and one-upmanship without fear that it was going to mean that they'd be pulling more weight because of it.
Back then, you had to weigh whatever the shipping weight was for your particular car; there was no adding weight to get into the top of the next lower class, nor removing weight to get to the top of your natural class. That fact caused a lot of strange combinations to be built (9-passenger wagons, convertibles, etc.) which just HAPPENED to fit the very top of a class break. If you didn't have such a car, usually, you could forget about ever having the national record in that class, because somebody with one of the fortuitous combinations would have it. I didn't say it was easy...
But, nothing lasts forever. It didn't take too long for the "thinkers" (and, there were many) to figure out that this system could be manipulated by artificially soft records, and letting records go to MINIMUM and not re-setting them to maximize handicaps.
If you had a "fast" car and reset an already quick national record by dropping it a couple of tenths, you became a VERY unpopular person, nationwide, overnight, with everybody who ran a car in that class. You just cost them two car-lengths of their handicap, from then on.
This situation didn't take long to escalate into a scenario that made it abumdantly clear that the "handicapping off national records" just wasn't going to be effective any longer. The racers had defeated themselves again, and the NHRA had to come up with something to replace the national record handicap system. I believe that's when Indexes were born... and the deal we have, now.
Returning to racing off national records sounds appealing,but due to the totally different mindset of today's racers, and the way the importance of national records has declined ( a real shame, IMHO), I am pretty sure it would not work anything like it did in the sixties. Too bad; for a while, there was Camelot...
Bill
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