The damage recently done

[Dwight Southerland]

Originally Posted by Lew Silverman

And I've been saying the same thing until I'm blue in the face! If the AMA is the "keeper of the specs", then open up the book to each and every vehicle that the Auto Manufacturers (foreign and domestic) made available to the general public for the last 20 years. You don't need to show any favoritism, you can keep the rules as liberal as you already have, and you just increased the number of competitors in our Eliminator.

Lew

That would be a fine goal except for the fact that the era when the AMA collected and published all the specifications for the members' offerings was short-lived and contained information that would be subject to high level debate and biased scrutiny, In fact, in its history the organization referred to as the AMA was reorganized several times, redefined several times, renamed several times and dissolved in 1999. Its the subject of a dicey history during all its existence. The real heyday was during WWII when the 654 manufacturers related to the automobile industry banded together to transform into a formidable war-machine manufacturing alliance. (George Romney was a major factor in making that happen.) Even with AMA specs, NHRA allowed Hydromatic transmissions behind fuel injected sedan deliveries, four-speed transmissions behind 2-barrel 283s and "enhanced" camshaft duration specs. The governing bodies are the major source of difficulty. What we may need every so often is a Jubilee, where all the enhancements are eradicated, all standards are re-established and let the chips fall regardless of whether or not individual people feel it is "fair". Fairness and judgment are sometimes fleeting and ethereal, definitely not Webster's definitions and mostly lip-service in Stock eliminator. The best effort that has been done to pacify the desire for fairness is shoe polish. All other efforts has been far less than satisfactory for a group of participants who think they are endowed with rights to be heard and attended to.