[Bret Kepner]

I guess I have a legitimate reason to post a response. Some of you know, (and most shouldn’t care!), I wrote for Super Stock & Drag Illustrated from 1977 to the bitter end of its final incarnation. Although I eventually carried the title of Senior Editor, I usually contributed event coverage and vehicle features. I would imagine the only articles under my byline which the regulars on this forum would recognize would be my annual coverage of SS/AA class eliminations at Indy from 1983 through 2000 which maintained enough focus on that class to eventually warrant the creation of the Hemi Challenge. When the magazine died, I devoted my energy to getting Indy’s SS/AA class eliminations on television and achieved that goal in 2001. However, that’s another (unpublished) story.

I’ve been editor of three publications and have had manuscripts, (concerning drag racing), published in sixty-two titles over the past thirty-five years. The point made by Evan, even in his attempt to make it more palatable for folks on this board, is critical for the survival of anything in life. It’s not 1970 anymore. In fact, the world is now two full generations removed from that era. If that’s impossible to accept, the world has already passed you by….decades ago.

Forty years ago, the sport embraced only two segments. If you weren’t racing in one of four professional divisions, you were class racing. Other than test-and-tune events at a handful of tracks, that’s all there was to drag racing. There were very few tracks offering a bracket racing option in 1970, (even as a singular entity), and most of the few which did have a bracket program presented it in what now would be called “index form”. We all know what happened to class racing so I won‘t bore you with a history lesson. The fact remains that, because of what happened to class racing, enthusiasts devoted their energy to new types of drag racing. Bracket racing, index racing, and a trillion different new heads-up classifications helped drag racing progress.

Forty years later, the only viable market for the intricacies and complexity of class racing are the same folks who were watching and competing in class racing forty years earlier. The world moved on.

Consider the basic concepts that no school has taught carburetor science for the past two decades and that automotive sales are based on every person's desire for the latest technology, peformance and convenience. Currently, I spend a huge amount of my time with racers between the ages of seventeen and thirty. They have no use for traditional class racing much in the same way a racer in 1970 had no desire to spend time thrashing a forty-horsepower four-cylinder 1930 Ford Model A. The technology was forty years advanced and the power could be bought and tuned to unimaginable performance levels. However, everybody here knew that so where’s the news?

The original lure of class racing was never in winning the eliminator; the objective for the construction of any vehicle was to win class…period. As the focus shifted toward winning the eliminator, the emphasis to most novices became placed on bracket racing. In fact, there were very few places to compete with a sportsman machine in a heads-up, no-breakout format, (outside of contemporary class eliminations in Stock and Super Stock Eliminators), from (roughly) 1980 through 1995. When the resurgence in street car racing came to the forefront of the media fifteen years ago, a rudimentary group of three classes in the original National Muscle Car Association led to a wave of new heads-up categories under a variety of rules and sanctions which blossomed into a huge change in the sport’s basic complexion.

…or so it would seem.

In fact, nothing ever changes. The racers who are involved in “class racing” in 2010 are still building cars for heads-up competition in a variety of classifications which are just as diverse and technologically demanding as any niche in Super Stock Eliminator. They’re doing it at almost every track in the country and they’re racing for decent bucks. Most of the folks on this board, (and, for that matter, most traditional class racers), just don’t see it.

As Evan noted, there are dozens, (maybe hundreds), of associations which present heads-up competition every week of the year at hundreds of tracks. Whether it be cars with 10.5-inch tires and stock firewall locations, naturally-aspirated stock chassis cars on drag radials or 3500-pound machines with no modifications but nitrous oxide injection on 8.5-inch D.O.T. rubber, they’re all racing in a “class” and they’re doing it heads-up with no breakout or index. THAT is modern day “class racing” to the majority of the drag racing enthusiasts out there in 2010 and THAT is where the market for magazine readership is “hiding”. They’re right out there in plain sight.

The incredibly restrictive options of competing in either NHRA or IHRA Stock and Super Stock, (including, but not limited to, number of events, basic payout and opportunity for recognition), simply become a deterrent to racing when compared with the ability to race as the featured attraction for a sizeable reward in a heads-up format on a weekly level at the competitor’s choice of tracks. In other words, traditional NHRA/IHRA legal class racing appeals to almost nobody but traditional NHRA/IHRA legal class racers in the tenth year of the twenty-first century.

In reality, it’s just the same thing over and over again. Modern heads-up “class” racing is no different than B/Gas in 1954, C/Stock in 1965, D/Modified Production in 1976 or SS/HA in 1987. It just looks different and has younger people doing it.

Fans still pay to watch. Track operators still present it for the that reason. Racers still show up to enter in it because it’s all about winning the class. Magazines still publish results and features about it because it is currently what sells magazines.

If you don’t see it, you’re not watching. If you weren’t watching, you got left behind. That’s life.

Bear in mind I’m a “traditional” class racer and past NHRA National Record Holder. I’m not typing this to cause a riot. I’m typing it because it’s the truth obscured by the trees deep inside the traditional class racer’s forest.