How NHRA could survive and really cut costs

[Greg Hill]

In tough times you need to cut costs and not raise prices. If it was my call the first thing I would do is move the home office to Indy.They already own a great facility and there is plenty of room to build a building to house the home office. You then could sell the California real estate to help the financials The overhead would go down tremendously just from a change in location. The next thing I would do is make the top job pay $250,000 per year with bonuses for increased participation in the form of new racers. I would change the board of directors from an overpaid bunch of former NHRA employees to reflect what's going on in our sport. Maybe something like 2 track owners, 2 pro racers, 2 sportsman racers, the ceo, the cfo, someone with legal background and maybe 2 people from the industry. This kind of board makeup would be much more in tune with what's going on in our sport and without huge salaries would be less likely to do things just to keep their position. When you start fresh like this you have the opportunity to really cut fat. I would make the home office much smaller and increase the size of the divisional personnel. Because a lot of the divisional guys are part time you could save a ton of money and actually have more people at the races.

Because they basically don't have any national competition they haven't in the past been forced to be efficient. If they were a for profit business in a competitive environment they would of had to do this years ago. The way NHRA is now structured there is no one to hold the accountable for their performance. Even though the board of directors has no ownership position in the company, they can do whatever they want. If management were held accountable to a board made up like I've suggested they would be much more interested in making the company healthy and growing instead of just feathering their own nest. Because of their non profit status instead of paying out dividends to owners or stockholders they have paid out huge salaries to top management and board members and have left very little money in the company to weather tough times. They way the company is organized now it WILL foster corruption and greed. If management were responsible to a board that had interests of making the company serve the members, track owners, racers and the industry better and more efficiently things would change dramatically.