Surely crossing Mike Dunn’s mind recently has been the adage “When one door closes, a window opens.”

The NHRA excluded Dunn from its new FOX Network broadcast team after his 14 years as a face of elite drag racing on ESPN.  Dunn’s legion of indignant fans contended that the former driver was a refreshing straight talker who knew the sport, its history, its cars, its personalities. They wondered, “Did his expertise as both a winning Top Fuel and Funny Car racer – not to mention the son of legend “Big Jim” Dunn – and an expert TV analyst not mean anything?”

It did to IRG Sports + Entertainment, the parent company of the International Hot Rod Association. Executives there Tuesday named Dunn IHRA President, giving him a huge window of opportunity to play a key role in reshaping the IHRA.

For years, the sport – sagging in attendance, missing a stable TV package, and under fire by racers in various sanctioning bodies for a variety of perceived injustices – had left the IHRA the chance to step up and be the hub of drag racing. And the IHRA never really seized the moment.  

Now Dunn can help orchestrate the IHRA’s return to relevance, thanks to an energetic, forward-thinking ownership group. In turn he could assume a pivotal role in elevating awareness of the entire sport worldwide.

Now his stature has stretched beyond TV commentator, beyond racer. His platform is so much grander. His mission is so much tougher, but his reward-to-risk factor as tantalizing as a 3.7-second Top Fuel dragster blast down the dragstrip [on the quarter-mile, if he had his preference]. He is a policy-maker, a drag-racing evangelist with an electrifying bully pulpit, a kingpin.

That’s the scenario that attracted Dunn, not for the glory – he has had that with 22 NHRA Wally trophies, status as the eighth of only 15 drivers to win in both the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes, and even a 1-1 record in IHRA final rounds. He knew he had the chance to contribute in a significant way to the sport that’s in his DNA.

Said Dunn, “When Chris [Lencheski, IRGS+E CEO] called me up and wanted me to be president of the company, I kind of wondered why he wanted me to be president. Then we laid out his plan, his business model for the company. I looked at it. . . . He has a plan . . . to get more eyes on the product from a global standpoint, also nationally, also a younger demographic.  When I read it, I said, ‘You know what? I think this has a pretty good chance of working.’

“The one big thing I liked,” Dunn said, “was . . . the fact that we’re going to be in our own markets [separate from the NHRA’s or the PDRA’s] and we’re also looking to go global, which needs to be addressed. After I saw the plan, I realized, ‘This could actually help the entire sport of drag racing.’ This plan addresses what is best for drag racing: getting more people involved, getting a younger demographic.

“It’s going to be a little bit different,” he said, “but . . . it’s all about drag racing. We all love the sport, and the fact that we can have more people see it, if it helps the entire industry, I’m OK with that. I just want to see drag racing grow, period. And IHRA, for me right now, is the vehicle to do that. I think it’s a pretty good plan.”   

Both Dunn and Lencheski said that in their first 10-15 hours of conversation, the subject of salary never came up.

“If I didn’t buy into what we were doing,” Dunn said, “it didn’t matter what the money was going to be.

“If I would have gotten call [saying],’Hey, we want to make you President. Here’s what we’re going to pay you to just do your job,’ I wouldn’t have taken the job,” Dunn said. “I realize, through racing all these years, you have to have a good team behind you. You have to have a plan. And you have to be willing to execute that plan and also realize at certain points you’re going to hit a snag and you’re maybe going to have to re-adjust that, which is what’s going to happen here. It is a good plan, but it’s not going to be perfect, and it’s going to be tough to get to certain points. But that being said, I still think we’re going to be able to do it.”  

Dunn also said he took a valuable lesson from the damaging IndyCar split and vowed not to duplicate that. He said the IRL’s tug-o-war with CART for racers, fans, and sponsors [a later version of what CART forced upon USAC before that].

“Say we do this project and we end up just diluting the whole sport – we take too much talent away and we’re fighting with the other association, trying to get market share in the United States, and we end up like the IRL, I don’t want any part of that,” Dunn said.

 Lencheski said stood out among the three finalists for the job because Dunn was committed to the company’s blueprint for building. (“I think they may have the best vision to come along in drag racing in a very long time,” Dunn said.)

“It’s not so much that Mike comes in and he’s a figurehead or just a face, because frankly, there’s not a person we couldn’t have hired with a checkbook,” Lencheski said. “It’s, ‘Mike, do you believe where we’re going matches your vision of where it could be if someone were basically starting from dust?’ ”

Lencheski said Dunn’s appointment is only the first of several blockbuster announcements in successive weeks that will signal IRGS+E’s scope of interest and intention to put high-powered individuals from core industries in the proper positions as the IHRA looks beyond its longtime home at Norwalk, Ohio.

IRGS+E is overhauling the IHRA in racing operations, television and digital, licensing, track and individual membership, and a newly developed Team Ownership Sponsorship Business Unit. Lencheski said the result will be “a first-class motorsports and entertainment platform. The future of the IHRA intends on delivering the world's fastest race cars, in important automotive manufacturer-influenced global markets, as a platform for growth in the important [age] 9-19 socially active ‘Generation Z’ consumers.” All that’s while appealing to “traditional drag-racing consumers.”

He said Dunn “has been a part of the most memorable moments that this sport has ever seen, and we are excited to have his expertise as a winning driver, businessman, and influential media member to help lead us forward."

So the IHRA is in the midst of a complete reorganization, one that will bring stability after a revolving door of four Presidents in the past couple of years or so. As it settles into its final structure, the sanctioning body is designing stunning features. Among them are:

Revenue-sharing with IHRA’s racers

A 2017 return of the Top Fuel nitro-headliner class (the Dragster-1, or D-1, Series that’s an umbrella for five or six categories)

An NFL Combine-style event to discover and begin developing younger talent

Pursuit of top media and corporate-communications leaders

Global expansion

Attractive racer purses

A reaffirmed commitment to sportsman racing

A TV package among other media platforms

A business office in Manhattan.

 

One of the more intriguing and revolutionary concepts is the revenue sharing.

Lencheski said, “If you’re in our Top Fuel structure, you’re part of the future revenue of growth of television and licensing. That is from Day One. If you are spending that sum to invest with us and running the amount of races that are required and participating in our contingency program, yes, you should be a partner. And to be a partner, you need to share that television and licensing revenue going forward. So that is definitely happening.”

The CEO spoke, too, of bringing back nitro-powered classes in “an entirely new structure” that will, he said, be “disruptive” to the industry but wildly popular with the fans. But he and Dunn cautioned that changes won’t come immediately. They’ll unfold during the next four years, with 2016 serving as what they characterized as a “bridge year.” Lencheski said, “We are in no hurry to fail.

“When you look at this sport and the way that we do, sitting from the perspective of an investment company, you have to put a racer-first mentality,” Lencheski said. “That led me to suggest to our board that we needed to not be an outlier any longer in the business of drag racing. This company lost millions of dollars and not just last year . . . millions of dollars for the last several years. So that definition of insanity, of effectively trying to do the same thing and expecting a different outcome, was something the board looked at.  It isn’t a drag-racing issue; it’s a consumption issue.”

What Dunn said he will bring to the mix is a sense of what is beneficial and appropriate for the sport of drag racing. He said in his 14 years at ESPN, he always framed his remarks in that context, with that consideration.

 “It was never about the sanctioning bodies. It was always about what I felt was best for drag racing, maybe sometimes to my detriment. Maybe that’s one reason why I’m not over there. But it doesn’t matter – I don’t regret ever doing that,” he said. “We are promoting drag racing. We’re not anti-NHRA. We’re not in competition with the NHRA. We’re not anti-PDRA or anything. We are pro-drag racing.  We’re just looking at this as a different way to get the sport out to a whole new audience.”

 Dunn is the second NHRA Funny Car driver to lead the IHRA. Texas Motorplex owner Billy Meyer, who won one IHRA Funny Car championship and eight races overall in that series, purchased the IHRA in the late 1980s.

The 2016 IHRA Drag Racing Series will get under way March 4-5 with the AMSOIL Spring Nitro Nationals at Florida’s Orlando Speed World Dragway. This year’s seven-race tour also will visit San Antonio; Budds Creek, Md.; Grand Bend, Ont.; Edmonton, Alta.; Martin, Mich.; and West Salem, Ohio.