[Alan Roehrich]

Evan, a two or three tenth advantage would be one thing. You know damned well that 14HP won't even slow them down enough for DeArmond and Sorenson to come close to catching them, never mind for the rest of us to even get close. Those cars make Henson's Hemi car look like a slug. Hell, even Hawk wouldn't have a prayer.

Is it great that at least Ford and Chrysler are interested in Stock? Sure it is. But cars that have never had a screw turned on them dialing 1.48 under the index in bracket mode is a joke, and we all know it.

"Taking advantage" of the rules would be having a car that would run 1.5 or 1.6 under the index after having a full Stock Eliminator style blueprint build, and running at the class minimum weight. What is going on now is making a mockery and a farce of the class.

Some of those cars will approach 2 seconds under the AA index if they'll hook up, and the engines haven't even been apart. Even with 14 HP on them, they are not factored as heavy as a ZL-1, an L-88, a real Hemi, or even one or two of the FE Fords. With the 14HP, they're only 4 HP worse off than a 427/425 carrying the 10HP aluminum head penalty.

The truth is that you can't safely or reasonably add enough weight to any of those cars to reign them in. In fact, before you even get close, their "natural class" would be about a pound and a half lighter per HP than AA. If they get close to the HP they should have, they won't be able to add enough weight legally in order to make class minimum..

The cars are cool. But they need their own class. If they hang enough weight on them to make things close to fair, the cars won't even be safe.

NHRA has a nasty habit of making very expensive and well developed race cars obsolete with a stroke of the pen. And they've done it again. They've done it at a time when racing is already in deep trouble, when the economy sucks, and Ford and Chrysler are knowing and willing partners and accomplices.

Spin it all you want, this isn't even close to the same as when the fuel injected cars, LSx or LT1 either one, came into the sport. And even if it was anywhere near close, it would still be wrong. In fact, it is worse. Doing it once could be excused as an honest mistake. Doing it a second time is nothing other than blatantly screwing the racers to make a buck. "*** for tat" or whatever you want to call it is not a game to play with other people's money.

I'd feel exactly the same if GM had done this with the Camaro. In fact, when GM was considering a Camaro Stock Eliminator program, I can tell you for a fact that the racers told GM they were not interested in pulling a ringer stunt like this. The racers expected NHRA to factor the Camaro correctly, and no one expressed a desire to have some sort of bogus ringer combination. The idea of using a supercharged engine was specifically rejected.