[Alan Roehrich]

Wade, I've had more than one well respected tech guy tell me they found at least 3 times as many illegal cars in the bottom half of the field as they have in the top half.

What Stock and Super Stock would be without random tear downs is an easy question. They would be a joke, a hollow shell of their former selves. Worse off by far than they already are.

Car counts are down because of the economy and the way NHRA treats the racers. We're about to pay $4 a gallon for diesel, the cost to go to the Gators, if we go, will be $1K in diesel alone. They jacked our entry fee, and our insurance charge, again, fees are up for the 3rd year in a row. They added a $250 fine for any leakage on the track. The contingency payout has shrunk. The regular purse payout has not gone up in so long no one can remember the last date, but I'm thinking a decade. We're the first cars cut from the run sheet due to ANY problems, weather, oil downs, etc, we get shorted a pass. They'll send us into eliminations with ONE PASS, on a green track, that may or may not even hook. We have to get there 1-2 days before the event, or park 90 miles from nowhere, probably in a bad pit space where the truck, trailer, or car, or all three, might sink or flood if it rains. And if the race runs over, we're the ones who lose an extra day of work because we get held over until Monday.

If they need to cheat to run 3 tenths under the index, they need to consider another hobby.

Tear downs are the least of anyone's worries. And if they are worried about being legal, they need to tear down anyway.

The last thing we need to do is further reduce and dilute the performance part of the performance based classes. Too much of that has already been done.