Hot topics heading into the offseason
Well, with the offseason officially here, we’ll use this month’s column to run down a few hot topics floating around the sportsman pits.
SCHEDULING
NHRA just released their schedule. As many of you know, I’ve written about scheduling and its effects on racers several times this year. I even went as far as making my own “mock” schedule several months ago. Well, NHRA recently released their divisional schedule for next year. While it doesn’t look anything like the mock schedule I caught so much flack for (much to the pleasure of some J), it does appear to be more spread out than the schedule we had this year in some of the divisions. For the most part, it seems to be a good step in the right direction.
Racers in Division 1 are going to have the toughest go of it. In my opinion, racers in that part of the country have the worst schedule to race. A racer could be looking at a stretch of five straight weeks in May/June with the combination of divisionals and nationals, and potentially four straight in August/September. That’s rough for any racer, regardless of class. Granted in Divisions 1, 3, 5 and 6, you have a much smaller window to run races than the southern divisions. So back-to-back weekends are a fact of life if you run out of that part of the country.
The fact remains that back-to-back races need to be minimized as much as possible. I think Divisions 2 and 4 really took advantage of their “window” and spread the races out a little better this year. It looks like there was better coordination between the neighboring
divisions in that their schedules aren’t stacked together like they have been the past few years. This should help racers in that part of the country have more choices of where to race.
Another interesting wrinkle to this year’s schedule is having two events on the same weekend to close out the year. Las Vegas will close out Division 7 and Reynolds, Ga., will close out Division 2, both on Oct. 24-26. Traditionally there is just one final divisional event of the season where all the championship scenarios play out. I’m sure as the points races wind down next year, there will be plenty of buzz in the pits as to who’s going where.
TAD PARITY
Ah, the dead horse rides again. I’ve written more on this subject over my young career than I’d like to admit, but the facts remain the same. I will give credit where credit is due: this year has seen the closest amount of parity the class has seen in a while.
After three percentage changes over the past few years to the A/Fuel combination, it has shown it doesn’t slow them down for long. We’ve seen Morgan Lucas go 5.16 and most recently Bill Reichert go 5.19 on 96%. In Pomona, the top ten qualifying spots were held by A/Fuel cars with the top two ranked blown cars in attendance. There were numerous .20’s by the A/Fuelers, while Whiteley held the blown mark at 5.342.
