Last night the local track had a midnight racing event for street cars. We had cars from waaaay outta town come and last I heard were over 250-mostly ricers. The place was packed till 5am when it was over and I wish half of them would come out on regular race nights-maybe now some might. My partner and I race every weekend and saw this as an opportunity to mop up and win some cash-it cost $15 less to enter and payout was $50 more than bracket winnings. I'll give the kids props for showing up and having fun-plus they talk trash like crazy, they'd look at my car and laugh-work in progress, not getting painted till after season, my buddy and I just laughed and told them to stick around and 1 of us will be in the final. Most had never bracket raced before and did'nt have a clue as what the dial-ins meant, plus-believe it or not-they'd wait for the actual green to take off-best R/T I raced against last light was like a 1.1 something-WOW. I was purposly sleeping at the lights so not to go red, I almost always passed them before the 330' then toyed with em till the line-I dialed a 14.0 and never crossed faster than 14.8-that's how far off these kids were. I won $250 and a 2 1/2' trophy for first-who cares about a $2 trophy, show me the green baby. Buddy went out 3rd round due to traction problems-he leaves at 3500rpm, the track staff did NO surface work at all-**** load of sand first 1/8mi. Anyways, around here or anywhere for that matter tracks should do this more often-there were easily 4-500 kids off the street, not drinking, and having a great time, grudge racing each other under "controlled" circumstances, not to mention it's like shooting ducks in a barrel for the guys like us who do this every weekend.

 

We have the same thing on the Friday night "Secret Street" program at the local track. I refuse to go out on Friday nights any more because these "kids" have no idea about what to do in the pits. I go up to make a pass, come back, and find a spectator car parked beside my trailer taking up my pit space.

"Most" of these "ricers" are not in it for the competition. They just want to go out with their buddies to see what their cars can do. If any of them were serious about competition they would be back for Sunday brackets. I always say that in bracket racing it's nice to go fast but speed means nothing. You just need to cut a good light and run consistant. Anybody can win. I also tell them that during Sunday bracket racing they can actually win money and a trophy. Friday night races win nothing except pride.

If we could get even half of the Friday night racers out to Sunday drags, the car counts would be fantastic.

Our Secret Street program started back in 1996. Since then a large handful of racers have switched over to bracket racing, including myself, but every one of them has a regular north american type car. None of the "ricers" have come out to race.

It all has to do with their attitude. It's a hard sell to get them to bracket race but at least they get off the streets and race properly at the track under controlled conditions.

 

Oh, I hear ya about the pit issue, we came back after 3rd round and spectators parked DIRECTLY in back of our trailers, like they were gonna drive up the ramps or somethin, then on the return lane or pit roads, watch the f... out cause it's as hard as they can run em-yes, it's always the few people with no common sense that make it bad for everyone else. I was jsut impressed to see that many people at our track, on race day you can count on 2 hands the spectators and to me that's a shame-all the racers tell the track owners to lower admission by $5 or so and they'd get more people, but "that's what we get at the other tracks we own and people don't bat an eye" Our track had serious mismanagement issues with the previous owner and is trying to regain peoples trust and it a slow process. I guess I'm hoping like you said to have at least a few guys come out and try it on race day, if they were'nt afraid to ask questions about this and that, they'd catch on quick and get the addiction like we have. In our street class we only have 11 cars, what makes it so hard is that we pit together, have fun and hate to line up against each other, when we are in the staging lane it's a single file line everytime cause we have three of us that are on all the time and they never want to line up, but I'd rather go out 1st round so at least I could buy back in. If everything goes good this week hopefully I'll have the new 350 tranny and much needed 3500 stall installed, then I'll really mess people up.