NHRA says it will open the 2009 Full Throttle season with the nitro machines still running to 1,000 feet. Even though safety dictated sub quarter-mile passes, mega-team owner Schumacher said, “It certainly has changed the length of some of the parts we can run. We haven’t run it long enough to say, ‘It saves us this kind of money.’ But it appears there’s less breakage.”

Kenny Bernstein, who lost Monster, will be in the final year of his current Budweiser contract in ’09. I ran a couple of ideas past him in his pit area: Should NHRA ban testing? Eliminate Friday qualifying?   

“I don’t think you can do anything to affect the fan base,” he replied. “That’s the first thing you have to be careful on. When you start having a knee-jerk reaction, if it affects selling tickets, it’s the worst thing we could do. I’m not in favor of anything that would not make the fans want to come out, because without the fans, we have no sponsors anyway. That’s cutting your own throat.

“Other areas certainly do. Testing is one. When you don’t test, you save money. The downside I don’t like

about that is if you need to perform to keep your sponsor happy, sometimes, testing is important.

“I’ve always looked at the control of expenses in racing, the organization (sanctioning body) has a very difficult time implementing anything that controls that. Anything they implement, the racers always seem to get around. Legally, but they get around it.

“The example I’ll give you is when Mr. (Bill) France (Jr.) told me they were going to go to seven tests a year, back when I was down there (NASCAR team owner). I said: ‘Do you know what that’s going to do?’ He said, ‘Yes, it’s going to save money.’ I said, ‘Bill, I don’t know about that. All that means is I’ve got to put another truck and trailer on the road with a skeleton crew and go to all the tracks in the country that resemble where we’re going to race the national events. It’s probably going to cost me more money.’ He said, ‘Oh, that won’t happen.’ Well, that’s exactly what happened.

“It’s up to the teams and the businessmen themselves to control it the best they can. It’s a hard deal to control any cost. We sat down this last week with all our people and went right down the budgets and started looking at stuff where we could save. Do I need five people here every weekend in upper management, to spend for airlines and hotels and rental cars? No, I don’t. 

“I’m not sure the organization can do much of anything. We have competition and that means you have to perform and that means you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to keep your sponsor happy.”

Talk that some companies priced out of NASCAR might move to NHRA apparently falls into the category of wishful thinking.

“The two venues are so different,” said Schumacher, “it’s difficult to take somebody that been at a NASCAR venue and bring them over here and see that this replaces that. It’s apples and oranges.”