[Jason Oldfield]

Maybe its just me, but I totally don't understand all of the resistance to this race. We're talking about a special race here, not changing the existing rules used by NHRA or IHRA. It's like an instant green race, or a backwards race, or a drive blindfolded race. If you don't like the format, don't go.

POA isn't my cup of tea, and I certainly would never see myself attending nothing but POA events, but I'd probably attend one or two just to have some fun. If I don't get picked, so what...it ends up being a testing session for me, and certainly no worse than if I had gone to a National Event and lost first round.

I have no idea what Rich's motivation is, but here's what I think. In MOST cases, the POA "finals" end up being somewhere in the 9.5 - 11.0 second range. But, have you seen the quality of most of the cars that compete? They're pretty bad. That said, I would bet that the majority of the Stock and S/S cars run in this same range (I had to check...99 out of 179 S/Sers at Indy last year were in this range, and I bet the vast majority of those were between 9.75 - 10.5). So, here's an opportunity for Rich to not only put on a race with CLOSE racing, but also with EXTREMELY HIGH QUALITY cars! That sounds like a big win to me.

Maybe more so for Rich and Pullin' TV than the racers (I believe they only pay out to the winner), but I know I can say that I don't get a lot of opportunities to race for $10,000 in cash for a $60 entry fee, regardless of whether I needed to get hand picked or not. In addition, any "real" race of this sort would most likely be just a standard bracket race, and I would expect that every hitter in the country would be there (like the Atco $25K races last year, which if I remember correctly was somewhere around $250/day to enter).

Just my $0.02 - I won't be going regardless because I don't have a Stock or S/S car, but if they told me my Corvette was welcome I just might give it a try...