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NHRA Has a Big Secret: Itself
"Why
are you going to Los Angeles?" the chatty person in the next airline
seat asked. "For
the NHRA." "Oh,
rifles and Charlton Heston, stuff like that?" "No,
that's the National Rifle Association. This is N-H-R-A, the National Hot
Rod Association. Drag racing." "Oh." Oh.
Oh yeah. The folks in
Glendora need to know this conversation has happened more than once. Plug
in Orlando, Tampa, Atlanta, Newark, Indianapolis, Chicago, Las Vegas for
"Los Angeles." It happens routinely.
Consider,
too, the March 9 issue of National
Speed Sport News. It carried an article featuring the remarks of
Stu Grant, general manager of global race tires for Goodyear. Grant
focused his conversation on NASCAR but acknowledged the World of Outlaws,
Champ Car, IRL, Formula One, short-track dirt and asphalt racing for
sprints and late models. Goodyear
has a contract as the exclusive tire supplier for NASCAR's Nextel Cup,
Busch, and Craftsman Truck Series. It also is the sole supplier for
NHRA pro ranks, yet Grant never spoke of drag racing. If
NHRA offers an excellent sponsorship value and ranks high in
sponsor-satisfaction issues among such "rival" leagues as the
NFL, NBA, and PGA Tour -- as results of a survey published in October 2003
in SportsBusiness Journal indicate -- why didn't Grant mention NHRA?
He named just about every American racing series, or certainly every style
of racing, and he didn't include NHRA. Other
studies have shown that motorsports fans in general, and NHRA fans
specifically, exercise brand loyalty. Yet when Grant said NASCAR and its
fans are key to consumer tire sales, he didn't lump NHRA in that group. We
have hundreds of examples that NASCAR-geared media don't have NHRA on
their radar screens. (Check any daily newspaper on Monday morning during
racing season and even some local papers during an NHRA-event weekend.)
Let's concede that NASCAR has motorsports' premier television package.
Think how disappointing to drag-racing fans was Darrell Waltrip's comment
during the recent Nextel Cup race telecast from Las Vegas. Waltrip
was complimenting Las Vegas Motor Speedway (and deservedly so). He told
viewers about the 3/8-mile paved oval called The Bullring, the dirt track,
the road courses, the Richard Petty Driving Experience, and racing/driving
schools that include Mario Andretti's and Derek Daly's. Almost as an
afterthought, Waltrip said of the sparkling jewel among NHRA facilities,
"They even have a drag strip over there." So
when NHRA President Tom Compton beamed at Pomona this February that the
sanctioning body is making big strides, he was mistaken. Back
in October 2003, Compton said, "NHRA is one of the best kept secrets
in all of sports." It still is. That's probably the longest streak in
drag racing history, after John Force's qualifying string of 350 events or
Angelle Sampey's 105 straight races. "We're
not mainstream, no matter how much we like to think," Funny Car
driver Gary Scelzi said. "They can paint the picture that they want
to paint, but I'm not seeing it. I'm not the smartest guy in the world,
and I'm the first person to stand up and admit it. I don't know how to fix
it. I don't know what the answers are, but all I know is I don't see any
progress." NHRA
stuck in Purchase Funnel A
favorite tool of Gary Penn, Competition Plus' marketing director, is a
graphic called "The Purchase Funnel." Widely recognized in the
marketing and advertising industries, it's an inverted pyramid that shows
the narrowing path a consumer navigates in arriving at a purchase
decision. At
the top is Awareness. Familiarity follows, and once a consumer knows the
product exists and knows something about it, the next steps are
Image/Opinion, Consideration, Preference, Shopping, and finally Purchase. Awareness
is the starting point. And sadly, that's where NHRA appears to be stuck.
Even
many who are aware of NHRA aren't terribly familiar with it. "Yeah!
It's cool! Big Daddy and Shirley!" they too often say. "Those
people are heroes," Scelzi said. "How are they so famous from
years gone by and now no one knows who the drag racers are other than John
Force? "I
think we've got a great hero in John Force. John is one of my closest
friends, on and off the race track. He has been so special to me my whole
professional career, to my children, to my wife. I can't tell you what
this guy has done. We're blessed with John Force, but that's one person.
John can't carry this whole sport," Scelzi said. "What
about the Phil Burkarts, the Del Worshams, the Tim Wilkersons? What about
the rest of the drivers? There are some personalities out there. We need
to be thrown in front of the camera and pushed. We need to let the people
decide who they want to watch win and who they want to watch get
beat." Scelzi
credited Coca-Cola's Powerade brand for stepping up to sponsor the series
when Winston was forced out by government edict. However, he said,
"The one thing I would love to see them do is do some television
advertisements nationally with the drivers of NHRA to help promote the
sport. I think that's one of the only ways to get this sport to go to the
next level, is to get some awareness."
Scelzi
is one of many who have wondered why NHRA drag racing hasn't benefited
from America's thirst for the extreme. "Here's
the way I look at it: Once people come to our sport and witness it and
live it, they're hooked, whether you're a NASCAR fan or an open-wheel fan
or any kind of motorhead, gearhead or race fan, period," he said. "If
I can get you into the gate, you will walk around with a bib on,
slobbering on yourself, amazed at what goes on," he said. "We
have one of the greatest sports on this planet. Now, I'm not sitting here
trying to bury NHRA, but I don't understand how everyone on this planet
doesn't love drag racing and how everyone doesn't know about it and how
everyone's not making a great living at it and we don’t have all these
teams and sponsors pouring in. I don't understand it. "Yes,
I'm probably prejudiced," Scelzi said. "I don't have all the
answers, but I know some of the things we're not doing we need to get done
-- if we're going to go to the next level. Or we're going to stay the same
or go backward." Top
Fuel driver Morgan Lucas said he so desperately wants NHRA to grow because
"It's something I want to do forever. So I want it to keep getting
better. "This
sport has so much potential to go places," the 21-year-old Top Fuel
contender told Drag Racing Action
magazine in its upcoming issue. "We're supposed to be the
second-biggest motorsports [form] in the country. That says a lot for the
sport. With the right nursing, the right people in charge at NHRA, the
right people working for the sport - your John Forces, your Bernsteins are
trying to help make the sport something it should be - we could be the
next FOX or ABC show that's on there, racing-wise. But we all have to have
that kind of a mentality to think this is where it can go, if we just go
in the right direction." Said
Lucas in that article, "Extreme is the new big thing in the sports
industry. I think [NHRA] should be known for that, but I don't think it
has addressed that. I think it would help the sport out a lot to be known
for the extreme thing. It's radical." He said NHRA should "just
be focused in on the fact it is
edgy. I think people like drama." Lucas,
who swears he has no marketing skills but seems to have a natural
abundance of them, talked about NASCAR personalities and that sanctioning
body's wildly successful exploitation of them. "You've got these
young, edgy guys who are so cocky and so confident and cool. That's what
we need to be," he said, adding that NHRA's trouble is "not
enough attitude in the sport. The bikes are cool. They're on the edge. I
think once people can relate more, they're going to go crazy. This sport
has so much more potential left. We can go everywhere -- we just have to
help get it there [by] making ourselves more exciting to the public." Can
NHRA ride any of NASCAR's coattails? Scelzi quoted Garlits' marketing
motto: "Copy the obvious. If you know it works, copy it. Don't
argue about it. Don't try to find a way around it. Copy it."
Scelzi
might not have all the answers, but he has some well-thought-out
suggestions. Citing
the various children's charities that NASCAR drivers and promoters
support, Scelzi (who has experience in organizing benefit functions)
asked, "Why couldn't we do a benefit baseball game in conjunction
with NASCAR -- show a gesture, pack a big stadium and play a game against
the NASCAR guys, just to get our names mentioned with them? Hey, it's a
charity. So what if it's a NASCAR charity? Big deal. It's to help
children, right, so what do we care? But get us involved." Drag
racers staged a baseball game to help injured Darrell Gwynn nearly 15
years ago. Scelzi said the event was successful then and the fact NASCAR
is far more popular now makes it a win-win scenario. He said NHRA might
"even get some publicity on some of the NASCAR channels to wake more
people up to know about us." He
said he liked NASCAR's model for grooming drivers and crew chiefs. And he
said he'd like to see NHRA promote the sportsman classes, "our Busch
Series . . . our Craftsman Truck Series." He said NHRA needs to help
tutor the low-budget and sometimes disorganized teams in how to appear and
conduct business professionally with the promise of proper support. "Give
them something and let them give you something back, but we've got to
support them," Scelzi said. "We've got to help these guys. It's
detrimental to our sport if we don't." The three-time Top Fuel
champion said he could've used some mentoring, even in the driving
department: "I drove in the alcohol classes for years. I jumped into
a Top Fuel car, and I won two races before I knew what in the hell I was
doing." Scelzi
said he learned from former Winston public-relations representative Rob
Goodman how to guide an interview with an uninitiated reporter and he's
willing to share that skill with younger or media-phobic drivers. He said
he and Force enjoy promoting the sport together, "because I think
we're both goofy and . . . more than happy to do it." But NHRA hasn't
tapped that potential. "I
drive for Don Schumacher, and I'm happier than hell," Scelzi said.
"But I don't believe all the sponsors should go to Prudhomme, Force,
Schumacher. It doesn't work."
Scelzi
wondered. Others have, too. "It's
very frustrating to me as a driver," Scelzi said. "I make a very
good living. If drag racing left tomorrow, it would be a horrible thing
for me to leave the sport, but I have a business to fall back on, thank
God. So I'm going to be OK. But the Brandon Bernsteins of the world, the
Del Worshams of the world, these guys make their living doing this. It's
important for them to continue to make a good living. "I've
talked till I'm blue in the face," Scelzi said. "I don't want to
be disrespectful to anyone, but if these things don't change, I don't know
that our sport's going to grow." He
explained with a hypothetical example how his perspective might differ
from NHRA's. "If
my seven-year-old son makes one basket out of 20 shots, I can say, 'Great
job, Dominic. You made a basket.' Or I can say, 'Geez, Dominic, one out of
20? C'mon, man. We've got to get better,' "he said. "It just
depends on what your goals are or what you think is a great job." NHRA's
box score reads the same every day, every year. Its statistics are static,
its M.O. monotonous, its vision invisible. And
for the record, it has nothing to do with guns. What's your opinion? Send your comments to Feedback |
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He
thought it was all about guns.
© Competitionplus 2005
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