Originally Posted by Maelochs
"To an average U.S. racing fan, not just sport car fanatics, they are nothing."
Ywes but we are talking about sports car racing--maybe I didn't make that clear? -- Racing is racing.
I have gone to Pro road races, amateur road races, short track dirt and paved races, motorcycle dirt and road races.
The average U.S. racing fan is what kept road racing going in the seventies when the factories walked away.
They bought the tickets that payed the tracks bills.
If all they needed was road racing hard core fans, the IMSA series would not have gone belly up almost twenty years ago, nor would the ALMS or GARRA.
As for "average" racing fans (i.e. racing fans that do Not like sports car racing) they are no different than football or hockey fans: they do Not like sports car racing. -- Just where do you get that information from, or is that just biased arrogance?
What they think about a sport which doesn't interest them is pretty much irrelevant. --Really now.
They are the ones who spent, what would be in todays money, millions of dollars for tickets by attending road races.
Tell track owners they are irrelevant and they will either laugh or cry at your ignorance of what they need to pay their bills.
They are the ones keeping multiple drag racing sanctions quite healthy.
They are also the same people who when I was young used to go to road races but now do not for the same reason they no longer go to current SCCA amateur races.
Spec. racing is boring on its best day.
And yes, I got them to spend money on SCCA amateur Nationals at Donnybrooke and Road America, more than once because some cars racing were the same basic cars they were driving.
Your point seems to be that only major U.S. factory involvement will bring us back to the late '60s ... I do not care about the factory boys but the regs. should be for cars built off of street cars, not tube-frame or carbon-framed funny cars.
Prototypes have never held as much fascination for me as sedan/GT cars.
Privateers kept racing going in the seventies and the fact they have been driven out is one reason racing has become lack luster.
Another point I raised earlier about selling performance cars: When U.S. autio manufacturers used Performance ans a chief selling point for quite a few cars in their product lines-- the Musclecar/Ponycar days---well, that just happened to be the same time they spent heavily in Trans-Am and Ford went to Le Mans. -- No it really started with the light weight full sized cars by Chrysler, Ford and GM for drag racing. Long before the Trans-Am, and years before Ford won at Daytona and LeMans.
GM tried to kill such cars but the back door boys kept on, keeping on.
Chevy also built the Corvette SS and Ford built racing versions of the two-seat Thunderbird.
Around 1972 the EPA, pollution controls, and skyrocketing fuel prices killed off the appeal of performance cars, and at no time since has selling really fast cars (or cars marketed as being really fast) been anywhere near as important to U.S. car buyers or manufacturers. -- That is bs.
That is the story I heard when I studied auto mechanics.
Yet Detroit kept at it slowly at first and now they are producing so called muscle cars at a rate exceeding the sixties and early seventies.
The supposed NEED is no greater or lessor than it was fifty years ago.
And unless the car-buying public suddenly sees the need to spend a bunch of money for performance capabilities which it can never use ... those days ain't coming back.---- It is not no different than it was then, even with the government sticking its nose where it does not belong.
Most buyers simply don't see the need for 600 horsepower, and "high performance" is no longer a nationwide selling point for a large part of any manufacturer's line-up-- -It isn't nor was it ever, what most people want or are willing to pay for. Most buyers never did, but car companies produced them because even people who cannot afford them pay attention, or they simply would not build them.
As I said, Chevy, Dodge and Ford are now building and selling produciton race cars for drag racing because there is a market they want to be in.
If the production of the non-streetable, no vin, cars did not help sell street cars, they would not build them.
Drag racing NOW has the interest and investment from Detroit that road racing once had.
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