Rick
Your right when you guess that most of membership geographically lives in the north central area ie; n. ill, s. wisc, But we need to balance the cost of travel versus our need to grow when the travel gets too costly both in terms fuel and time on the road then we start to lose racers.
Also we don’t want to show up at a race track with a poor car count (i.e. >16 cars) because at some point the race track won’t consider us worth bothering with. Plus our winners and runner up monies with a low car count is reduced.
Regarding “
But what’s also a concern is the bad taste that racers are getting with NHRA and all that bull” Well that why we started the Midwest Super Comp Series 25 years ago. However it’s been our experience that, the prestige of winning a Wally and an NHRA race overrides people’s common sense.
For example last year approximately eighty super comp racers showed up at Joliet for the div 3 race and paid $180 and spent 3 days there to race
one race for $1200. If the MWSCS could draw that many cars we would pay $2700 to the winner and $1350 to the runner up and we would give you two races in two days for $200 in entry fees!
If we could just draw thirty six cars we would pay the winner $1215 plus (and this is big) one half of the racers (everyone who won one round or more) would have gotten paid as well.
We (My son and I) were at Joliet because it was on 15 mi. from home but after three days and winning two rounds we didn’t get paid enough to cover half of the money we dropped at the gate, At which point my adult son looked at me “What are we doing here?” and I didn’t have an adequate answer.
So when you state “
Racers would consider other venues if they were available” except for a small minority that not really true. It’s very difficult to get Drag Racers to think logically instead of emotionally. We pay 100% of our entry fees back to the racers yes the track does get their money out of us at the gate but we pay out 100% because we (the Series/Board) are not in this to make a profit were in it because we love to race and want to keep it affordable and have enough money in our pockets on the way home to buy a couple of cheese burgers.
Enough preaching I'm sure there are others who defend the NHRA and their contingency payout monies so I’ll get off this soap box now.
P.S. If you send me you mailing address I’ll send you a compass and you can just follow the needle! LOL
