Pure Stock Thread - Foreign Makes

As a fellow Pure Stock'er Dan my personal opinion initially is that I don't have any use for them. They are of no interest to me BUT there is a large sport compact and import crowd doing a lot of amazing things with their cars. Whether or not you like their platform you have to respect the results. I do have a couple other points though for ponder ...

1. As I look at the "Live from ..." pictures posted from folks attending events (which I love to see!) look at the average age of many of the Stock and Super Stock racers. I'd be curious to know the median age at any given event. I promise you it's hovering somewhere close to 50. Not that these folks won't race for a long time but "young people" don't seem to be attracted to class racing unless their parents got them going in it. I fear that if new blood doesn't come in one day it will be dead. Heck, look at the numbers now at events as compared to 10, 20 ... 30 years ago. You can't argue that it's not declining and although the economy may be to blame some racers are retiring and not being replaced.

2. The old cars are becoming harder to come by and how many 20-year olds can afford a DP, COPO, CJ, etc.? The imports and sport compacts are very affordable and of interest to those people. I'm sure every generation of racer and gearhead may not agree with what the next does with the cars that are available to them but if they are modding, learning, building, ... racing what does it matter?

And finally for a "what it's worth" ... and please don't kill me for this ...we recently pulled the transmission, differential, and entire rear suspension from our CORVETTE and EVERY bolt was metric and I noticed on more than one part a stamping where it was made outside of the USA. I thought about that more than once while I worked on it ...

[Jeff Kempton]

Dan, I understand where you're coming from but in my opinion it's not feasible for the following reasons:

1. IHRA depends heavily on the NHRA Class Guide to police their Stock and Super Stock classes (including Pure Stock). This Guide took a lot of work over many years with the cooperation of the domestic manufacturers to reach it's current level of completeness. I can't picture IHRA having either the interest or resources to develop a Class Guide for the multitude of foreign combos to make it feasible, even if they somehow got the foreign manufacturers to provide the factory specs for inclusion.

2. While it's true that the majority of young people are into foreign cars, I haven't seen very many of those cars that are stock. The way they seem to prefer to build them would not create cars legal for Pure Stock.

3. The tuner crowd seems uninterested in racing in classes with a bunch of rules and restrictions. That is what Stock and Super Stock is all about.

I realize that the above comments are generalizations and that not everyone is like that, but I think a majority of them are, and that would pose a significant roadblock to your idea. My 2 cents.

Originally Posted by Jeff Kempton

Dan, I understand where you're coming from but in my opinion it's not feasible for the following reasons:

1. IHRA depends heavily on the NHRA Class Guide to police their Stock and Super Stock classes (including Pure Stock). This Guide took a lot of work over many years with the cooperation of the domestic manufacturers to reach it's current level of completeness. I can't picture IHRA having either the interest or resources to develop a Class Guide for the multitude of foreign combos to make it feasible, even if they somehow got the foreign manufacturers to provide the factory specs for inclusion.

I never thought about the classification guide; good point! I don't know that IHRA even has the man-power to address this issue which would have to happen before they could race. Putting together one of those would have to be overwhelming and unbelievably time consuming.