This year John Force Racing potentially has a quarter of the Funny Car field at any event. What does John do without his benefactors at Castrol and the Auto Club of Southern California? John’s old on-fire, barnstorming, match racing days are done. Without enormous corporate sponsorship Force goes the way of Don Garlits.
Don Schumacher and crew hunt for every sponsorship dollar there is out there and provide exposure for sponsors far beyond their real dollar involvement, spreading sponsorship aboard seven competitive and highly visible rides. What if there were no longer a need for battery chargers in the industrial or consumer sector and Schumacher Electric had a couple of lackluster years? There go a few more racecars and bikes from Sunday’s show.
Spread out among the rest of drag racing is the generous Lucas family. They are powerful sponsors who help so many racers on so many levels, from supplying much-needed product to cash. Son Morgan’s Top Fueler, his A/Fueler, Larry Morgan, ‘Ace’ Manzo, ‘Big’
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So, we hope to hold on to these benefactors who help keep it going, but how sad is it that the future of our sport sits in the hands of a very few.
This year I heard a few old-timers hoping NHRA would jump in to help save nostalgia racing now that Goodguys left west coast drag racing for the more lucrative car show circuit they run so well. Many nostalgia racers bashed Goodguys for being some kind of money-grubbing overlord, forever slipping their hands into the racer’s wallet.
Now that Goodguys is gone from promoting west coast drag events we’ve got individual promoters and track operators putting on nostalgia shows like the March Meet at Famoso Raceway from Blake and John Bowser. It’s nothing on the level of the NHRA show, but providing a safe, competitive racing environment for the nostalgia crowd is important as well and the March Meet is the Daytona 500 of vintage drag racing. But they sure don’t need NHRA’s help other than to provide the rules for safety.
It’s pretty amazing to me that whenever a possible gap develops in drag racing some people think NHRA is the only entity that can step up to save it all.
My point is that today’s NHRA management basically has a “Golden Goose” that keeps laying the high-dollar eggs people want and there’s probably not very much they can do to screw it up. Fortunately there are a few other “geese” around with gold in their pockets to sustain a very small part of the racing world while other drag racers go hat-in-hand for the rest of the pie.
