[Dwight Southerland]

Shipping weight is literally what the name implies. There was an agreement between the members of the AMA and the transportation providers (trains and transport trucks) about a system to report weights for billing and logistics. The assumption was that the vehicles would be shipped with a minimum of fluids for safety concerns and that all options that would have a significant affect on the shipping weight would be documented and standardized. NHRA (Farmer Dismuke) determined that was the industry standard of weight and adopted it for NHRA's classification system. Before that, the cars were actually weighed at the track and the class break calculated then. It doesn't take much imagination to see why that didn't work.