Now you don’t want to make it too small so people can’t see it. We’ve got to realize this and we’ve got to get back to where you can get your parts in a junkyard. When we were racing cars that you bought the parts from the junkyard, that was when short track racing proliferated because every community’s got salvage yards and the cost of parts was cut in half at least.
And you can do a lot of your own work yourself. Well today, a significant amount of most racing parts, you’ve got to buy from a specialty house. They don’t make many of these -- the manufacturer -- so the price is way up. There are very few things you can get from a junkyard anymore, and that’s forced a lot of people out of the racing business.
A track owner has to make a spectator’s money worth leaving all the comforts of home and want some track action. Wheeler’s Legend car races are spiced up with bus racing. They may cause a racing purist heartburn, but they are great fun to watch – and the crowd goes wild.
I think that what’s going to have to happen also is that we’re going to have to build our race cars on assembly lines because that’s where you really cut down on the cost. If you build a roll cage on an assembly line, and you’re a farmer with a barn and a welder, you buy the tubes, and by the time you get through doing it, you have not saved any money from that
assembly line roll cage.
But we’re not doing that. We’re doing it over here, and there’s a few other people too. But this has to happen across the country. We have to have assembly-line racecars because that’s why cars cost so much money now. With assembly lines, you can buy at OE prices, you don’t have to go to that speed equipment manufacturer and pay $900 for a $200 part that you can buy if you bought in quantity.
Also, whether people admit it or not, there’s going to be a significant amount of tomorrow’s racecars built offshore. Particularly spindles and parts like that that can be made for 25% of what you can make them for in the U.S. You’d be amazed at how many parts they are running right now that are built offshore.
OT: I saw dedicated oval track oil pans made for small block Chevys coming in from offshore builders years ago.
HW: That’s where it’s going. We’re not really a manufacturing nation anymore. We’ve become a marketing nation. So I’m sure it was an American company marketing that deal.
Cost is the critical thing. Most of your weekly shows run from 16 to 25 thousand dollars a night to run. That’s OK if you’re selling four or five thousand tickets -- which there’s only a handful of tracks that do that. So you’ve got to get the cost down. To get the cost down, you’ve got to get the purse down. To get the purse down, you’ve got to get the cost of the car down so people can afford to race it. Or we’re just going to continue to go down this rocky road.
