Not good chatter about the AHRA going on the racing boards

• Gilliam canceled their AHRA affiliation, supposedly (so claims a track employee) because employees not being paid.
• There are claims that winning drivers at Midland were told they’d get their winnings wired to them (we all know that generally means they’ll not get the promised purse — if any purse)
• San Antonio (suppose to start today) was canceled “Due to rain” — while the weather reports show a nice weekend. SIR is a pretty nice 1/4 mile (getting rare) track with plenty of hard pits, and gave up their IHRA sanction to be AHRA. I wonder where they go from here to fix that?
• Rumors are that Calgary is pulling out

I’ve not verified any of the above personally (except the San Antonio race) — but you can find the comments on many racing boards.

It would look like the AHRA’s 15 minutes of fame never came the second time around, and I suspect all news concerning the AHRA in the future is going to be very bad news for them. Building it and they will come — doesn’t work if you don’t have money to see it all of the way through. Hope and Change sounds good — but it takes leadership and a good plan.

I almost was going to run their series instead of the NMCA — and it looks like I came to my senses just in time.

Over the winter, I tried to get something going with the AHRA and NSS — and I thought it was a natural fit. However, I while I found Rod Saint (related to the original AHRA owner) to be a pretty nice guy — I felt Troy Moe (related to the more recent AHRA owner) to be arrogant and condescending. Only the Texas NSS drivers really wanted to take a chance with the AHRA — but I (in the end) told them that someone else needed to make it happen as I didn’t want to speak with Moe any further. I ultimately just sent Moe an email saying I was no longer interested in being the point guy in NSS discussions.

Too bad they couldn’t have been the Nostalgia Drag Organization that they gave the impression that they wanted to be. It appeared to have been a good concept on the drawing board — but most likely with the wrong people at the wrong time. The AHRA’s recent history in Seattle with charges of political corruption against the owners and inter-family lawsuits over ownership most likely didn’t help either. My personal bet is that you can stick a fork in the AHRA. I hope they at least pay the winning drivers and track employees. The last real AHRA owner (who owned it before Moe’s uncle made it a one race deal in Seattle) paid the drivers out of his pocket prior to throwing in the towel. My only business failure had me pay all of my bills prior to throwing in the towel — as it was the right thing to do — regardless of how painful it was to my family. I believe what goes around comes around.

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NSS Cars Comic Book Renderings

On the Nostalgia Drag Racer's Board you will find a thread in the NSS forum with some larger comic book rendering of the below.

A calendar (along with T-Shirts, mouse pads, and coffee mugs) with these images can be found at : http://www.cafepress.com/texasbigbird/7161970

 

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NEW FEATURE

The One Stop Site For All Nostalgia Drag Racer’s Events

In the left side bar — you will see listings of Nostalgia Drag Racing event names — and their dates. Clicking on the link will take you to the web site with more details on the event.

If you don’t see your favorite Nostalgia Drag Racer’s event listed, click the link in the Page Category that allows you to submit an event — and we’ll get it quickly posted. For the event to get listed on this site, it will have to have to be an event with at least one Nostalgia Drag Racing Class, and there has to be a page giving details on the event.

The goal is to make this site the one place to go to find an event for you to attend or race at. Be sure to book mark this site and return weekly for updates in Nostalgia Drag Racer News and events. Be a good friend, and email your friends to tell them about his site.

While I have your attention — I’d like to also point out the links to the Forums, and the Archives. In the forums you will find discussions having anything to do with the interests of Nostalgia Drag Racers. Your participation is welcomed. Since this front page only shows the last 20 News items, and the site is updated frequently, the archives is the place to go for reading older news items. They’re categorized by the month it was first reported.

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The Nostalgia Super Stock forum, which since 2007 has been hosted by www.OldHippie.com, is now being hosted at the Nostalgia Drag Racer’s forums. Click the forum link at the top of this page to visit the forums on the Nostalgia Drag Racer’s board.

The reason for this move is because the Old Hippie site’s most popular forum is the political forum — and many racers preferred not to participate in a racing forum hosted on a board better known for its political forum. Rest assure that the the Nostalgia Drag Racer’s board has no political forums — just forums for the different areas of Nostalgia Drag Racing.

Please check out that site and participate in the discussions.

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Tower and Crossover Bridge at the Starting Line

Dallas Jones has announced that cleanup after the flood has gone slowly — but that they intend to be finished and reopen May 22nd. As of right now, the Nostalgia Race scheduled for Father’s Day is still on.

Scoreboards and Tech In Building

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Ning Pulling The Plug on Free Sites

NSS Racing and Mopar Drag Racing Ning Sites to Disappear in July

www.nssracing.ning.com and www.mopardragracing.ning.com will be disappearing in July, as NING.com will be charging for their sites. It was all a set up to get people to spend a lot of time and energy developing sites — then telling them they want as much as $45 a month per site.

 

The ning sites were great because they allowed racers to have their personal blog — and really excelled at providing one place to list and check on racing events. I will be finding better ways to see that the same features are available on other non-ning sites.

 

This does not affect the non-ning sites listed below. Features will be added to them to cover for the loss of the ning sites.

• www.MoparStyle.com

• www.NSS-Racing.com

• www.NostalgiaDragRacers.com

• www.BigRedRam.com

• www.VitaminC-Racing.com

• www.OldHippie.com

• www.MoparStyle.com/forums

• www.NostalgiaDragRacers.com/forums

• www.OldHippie.com/forums

Look to the above sites to add the features to pick up the slack as we'll be going "Cold Turkey" on Ning, and not paying for them playing Pusher Man.

 

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A new feature of this web site is that your can share on your profiles and walls at blogging sites. Just go to the post or page that you want to share and look down in the left sidebar for a box called Bookmark. Click the appropriate community and badda-bing badda-book you’ve linked that message.

Give it a shot on the next post or page you’d like to share.

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Dave ‘Old Hippie‘ Schultz will be running the Vitamin C 63 Plymouth at the NMCA events until the 60 Plymouth (Texas Whale) wagon is ready for prime time. As such, Dave created a very simple and basic web site at www.VitaminC-Racing.com.

Dave will continue to run the Big Red Ram at the non-points events like the Monster Mopar Weekend.

For those interested in having a web site for their car — a site like the Vitamin C site only took about 3 hours to set up the “Look & Feel”, and once that is properly set up, context is simple to add in a WYSIWYG text editor.  No HTML code is needed to maintain a web site.

So anyone can maintain a web site on their race team, and those with a little computer experience can even set it up themselves. Dave created all of the below listed web sites were created with a free application called Word Press.

• Nostalgia Drag Racers
• Diamondback Engines
• NSS Racing
• Big Red Ram
• Vitamin C Racing
• Fugly Racing
• Get Out Of The UN
• George D. Schultz – Author
• Chairman Obama

Using something like Word Press or Joomla  makes it quick and easy to set up a full-featured web site in hours without knowing any code. The actual costs of creating your own web site are:

1. Domain Name = < $10 a year
2. Web Hosting = < $4 a month
3. Software = Free

If you really prefer to have someone do the initial setting up of the web site for you, so that all you need to do is add more features and text — Dave can do that for you. There is a page on the Vitamin C Racing site which details that.

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Today it was announced on the NMCA site that the Bowling Green race canceled last weekend will not be rescheduled for 2010. Severe damage to the track and scheduling conflicts were given as the reason. The Point’s championship will now be the best 6 of 6 races.

Visit the NMCA web site at http://www.nmcadigital.com/ for other details.

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Beech Bend Raceway in Bowling Green, KY

NMCA called the Bowling Green Race on Thursday night. We stayed Friday until 5:30 to Test & Tune. We drove back to Houston in the rain, arriving home Saturday night. Some of the racers wasn’t as lucky as we were (see the forums).

The below is us T&T Friday late afternoon, and the above is a Saturday morning photos looking at where we were pitting just hours earlier.

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Bowling Green Report

NMCA’s call to pull the plug — the right call

NMCA’s race in Bowling Green, Kentucky was suppose to have been kicked off with TT and 1st Round of Qualifying on Friday April 30th, Finish up Qualifying Saturday, and Eliminations on Sunday. In recent years, the event has had rain being a big player in running the event — with last year’s race canceled and not rescheduled, and the year before seeing racers have no Time Trials and I believe we had just two Qualifying passes.

The event for my team started weeks prior. We’ve been having problems sorting out the black 65 Coronet that Dallas will be running in NSS, and I was unfamiliar with the “Vitamin C” car, having made only 7 passes — all in Bradenton. We couldn’t get track time (since returning from Bradenton) to work out these problems. We took the untested black Coronet to Dallas two weeks ago hoping we had it fixed. We didn’t. More late night’s thrashing on it and then a chassis dyno Thursday night. We only made two passes on Dyno before blowing a tube in a slick — but felt like we had the problem worked out.

Replacement parts over-nighted, and we finally had the cars ready, loaded, and the coach prepared late Tuesday night. There was a lot of chatter on the boards about people not planning to attend because of the 40% chance of rain Saturday and Sunday — but we are running the whole series and aren’t afforded the ability to be “Fair Weather Racers” We left Texas on Wednesday morning, as we need to get to the track on Thursday — as it gets harder to find a spot (and negotiate around a crowded) for an 84′ rig on Friday. We pulled into a West Nashville WalMart parking lot at 1AM Thursday and got a full night’s sleep. At 10 AM we were just crossing the border to Kentucky when Scott Sparrow called to ask if we’d left Texas yet. “Left Texas — Hell, were 50 miles from the Track”!

Scott said that the chance of rain had increased to 80% with flooding — and that Charlie might have to pull the plug, so he was posting for people to not leave for the race until a decision was made at 4PM. The message was too late for us — as we were almost to the track — so we continued on. There was a long line waiting to get in when we arrived at the track — and everyone had gotten the word with everything being on hold. The gates opened at noon to get us off the road, and NMCA staged us — without taking our fee, which wasn’t encouraging. While waiting, I was walking by the Power Mall at about 2:30 when I overheard Charlie Harmon give the word to not set up the store any further. At 4PM we got word that the plug for the event was pulled.

Rumor was that the Rousch team wanted to rent the track for a T&T on Friday — and so a group of NSS racers decided we’d like to do the same. Heck — we wanted to have the 6-7 of us there to race for the event’s points as long as we were already there. Arrangements were made to rent the track Friday for $150 per car — with a $1500 minimum. They wound up having 20 of us take advantage of the opportunity, and I was the first car down the track at about 9AM Friday morning. My Vitamin C car is sorted out (11.04, 10.99, 10.97, and 11.03) with me figuring out what RPM it likes to launch and shift at — but we still have problems with the black Coronet Dallas is running. We now believe it to be electric — and will try to work it out before Maple Grove. At about 5:30PM, with the storm quickly approaching from the west (obviously the direction we’re going), we were one of the last to leave the track. We wanted to get as far away and South as we could from Bowling Green. At about 1AM the driving was near impossible, and we had a bracket holding the coach’s mud flaps break and start to drag in the road — so we pulled into a WalMart (that looked to be on high ground) parking lot in West Little Rock, to rode out the first wave of the storm. We left at 10:30AM and finally pulled into the shop at 7PM.

While we were at the track for testing, the rumor was the race would be rescheduled for July. The NMCA site says that they should have an announcement on Tuesday.

Finally, some of us had a run of bad luck beyond driving cross country for a cancelled race. Damon Kuhn (Fugly – 61 Plymouth NSS) and his crew Chief (Slim), had a trailer flat going through Franklin, KY — and stopped in Nashville to get a replacement spare for the rest of the trip home to Texas. That put them behind the eight ball with beating out the storm — and so they pulled into a motel in Jackson, TN at about 10PM.  During the night the motel’s parking lot flooded and a large sink hole formed under Slim’s new truck. The truck had water over the dashboard (see photos of water in the glove box), and Fugly has an inch of water on the floor. The truck is a total loss, the trailer questionable, and Fugly will need some checking out. They’re currently stuck in Jackson, TN as I-40 in both directions is closed, as is I-65. They need to wait until at least Monday for the Insurance adjuster and a tow vehicle to come home. Click Here for a thread with details and photos.

The bottom line is that the hard decision to pull the plug on the race as early as it was pulled, was by far the right decision. While it didn’t help about 20 of us that have to leave early — it did help the majority of racers. Had we sat through the weekend at the track in the hope of getting some of the race run — there most likely would have been a lot of damage to many cars. I don’t envy NMCA as their decisions are usually going to be a “Damned if you do – damned if you don’t” calls.

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