[Dan Bennett]

This has been an interesting thread with both sides making good points. But in my opinion, nothing I've seen will help the problem. That's because imo what has caused the decline has nothing to do with drag racing, or even cars for that matter.

I spent many hours in the towers from the late 80s through the turn of the century. I had a lot of conversations and listened to a lot more. Back then, a very strong majority of the people with NHRA running the race and the sport were serious car people and most had been racers themselves. They knew, they understood, and their eyes would light up just like the rest of us.

But during that time, the country was changing rapidly from the previous "make a good profit, keep things moving forward" to "yearly or quarterly results are everything". I don't want to argue economics or politics, that's just something that was very apparent to me.

So since it was "good business", the car guys begain getting replaced by MBAs and marketing majors. They knew little or nothing about the sport but had degrees that taught them how to maximize profits. Actually getting out and talking to your customers, from their studies, was nowhere near as important as buying reports from marketing companies and watching what other successful ( = quickly increasing the bottom line) businesses were doing. Yes, I heard many of them (fairly often) talk about sportsman racing being mostly filler for the pros.

At this point, other than the Dragster staff which is sadly just a ghost of what it once was, there's only a handful of true car people left. I would be highly surprised if anyone in Glendora could even explain the difference between SS and Stock other than "well, one gets to do more stuff and is faster" Other than Tech and DDs, it isn't part of the current job description.

They have no idea of how or why all of us fell in love with the sport in the first place. I doubt they ever will. So the decisions they make don't include much thought about what is good or bad for the racers they control. They aren't evil people out to get us. They simply have no idea why we do what we do and why we feel so strongly about how it is done.

When we are all talking about somebody making a moonshot run or building a really creative car, something like that never enters their conversation. But quite a few of them would know that one of the fuel drivers doubled their tshirt sales during the event.

Sorry for the length, but I just wanted to unload some thoughts after being partially on the inside and mostly on the outside watching the sport over the years.

And we have little power since the proxy vote that gave the board the sole power to do whatever they wanted. That's a lot more than I want to get into here other than stating that I did not support that move. Sadly, I think most members of the time were thinking "Wally always looks after us, if the NHRA wants it I'll go along".