Quote:
Originally Posted by Randall Klein
Trends? How about the youth caring more about video games than getting a license, cost of cars (let alone race gas, entry fees, showroom cars not in the guide etc), or the aging curve of class racers, general economy stagnation, more choices for discretionary income, dysfunctional sanctioning body......those are more discouraging than track availability. More encouraging is the on-going investment of racers building $100k plus cars, the new blood from the factory race cars.....these single purpose cars will be raced somewhere, and the Northern Class Nats may be a start of racers taking ownership of our future
I would guess there is enough passion and $ to run this out about 10 more years, could be wrong, hope so...it's the trend I see
|
Randall, you make valid points. But there are lots of youths into cars and racing, just not the kind we are into.
Last weekend I went to Fayetteville Motorsports Park in NC to make some test and tune runs-they had a group there called 'Horsepower Junkies' that rented the track. They had 4 classes of competition as I recall, and there were probably 125 or 150 cars there with lots of spectators-as many as I have seen at any local track in a long time. The cars were all new muscle-mostly '98 and newer Corvettes (even a couple Z06's) , camaros, mustangs, Crysler 300s and even a few new caddies-only a spattering of imports and the only old cars were a 69 chevelle and a 70 AMX. The new muscle all had tags from what I saw and many of them ran in the 11's or quicker. There were at least 40 late model corvettes.
Almost all of the cars had power adders, especially turbos and pro chargers. It was kind of a hokey deal- no rules or scales and all heads up-and a 'party' environment. And lots of broken rear ends too, I might add. I can't imagine many class racers or bracket racers being caught dead at such an event, but by the same token this Horspower Junkie crowd looks at other forms of drag racing and they just aren't interested.
These people are spending money on their cars. What is a 2008 Corvette worth, and then add on the forced induction and etc?