I think the New Cars are cool! Love the racers that run them too. We don't have one. That being said, it is not working when the owners of old cars and the owners of new cars are unhappy avout it. NHRA bears the responsibility here. They should be working on a plan that allows old and new to compete within the same zipcode at least. Everyone that has been arou d understands that the new combos, whatever they have been and will be are going to get a softball factor. If they didn't, no one would buy or build them. That wouldn't be good for the sport. The problem is that NHRA has allowed factors that are a 100hp or more off. AHFS is not designed to address that kind of variance.
The highly compensated executives could make adjustments to tighten it up juat a touch. Indy was no mineshaft and yet, many racers were worried about going too fast.
When you are at Indy, and you are worried about going too fast, the system needs work.
In our case, we didn't qualify. Not crying here. If we had our stuff together, we could have. We just didn't get it done. Next year perhaps, even with more new cars. That will be our goal. I would rather struggle to qualify than shut off half track. I would enter the super classes if I wanted that. The point is that we need both new and old cars. It should be hard to compete against the new stuff, but not impossible. We need constructive and perhaps new ideas to help keep performance in play and enough parity to keep the many cars that exist in play.
As far as getting HP. I get it. However, it is one thing to get hp because of mineshaft conditions like the Gators, but in the soup at Indy? Please stop the crying when you have another 80 hp to bank and still be competitive. And, if you aren't willing to pull out the stops to go for class at Indy, what the heck else would you save it for? Nobody cares how fast you go in testing. Call it ego or trying to measure up with others. Indy has always been a measuring stick for performance. I hope that doesn't change.
Now, you might say I have no idea about what the new car owners feel like, but that would be incorrect. On the first qualifying pass, they had our car incorrectly listed in I Stick instead of E stick. Number 2 qualifier! 10.84 on a 12.20 index. Sound crazy, but if we could run the 327 in I at 229 hp, it would be a lot like some of the crazy factors that are popping up these days.
. They fixed it of course, but a girl can dream right?