A Clean ImageWhite pants & shirts, car clubs, and drag racing's loss of innocence |
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ext time you’re watching either an NHRA or IHRA drag racing event, take note of all those professionally designed, super-graphic, crew uniforms. Makes one wonder if the safety tech inspectors haven’t taken to requiring that pro teams to present their crew duds along with the race car, for official inspection! Today every team has them, and when the pro teams populate the staging lanes the effect is that of a color-coordinated, never-ending TV commercial. It’s all part of the “get professional” wave that swept the upper strata of drag racing a couple decades past. The result was a tsunami of over-logoed, matching shirts and trousers now draped over every team member that could possibly garner three seconds of on-camera time. This all seems to have coincided with the appearance of powerful consumer market sponsors wielding the economic power to dictate how they want their chosen few and their product logo’s to appear on camera.
This may not be an entirely a bad problem. Pro level drag racing is today all about money, and drag racing needs all the fat corporate bankrolls it can find to aid in expanding the often thin fields of quality, pro level race teams. The perhaps unwanted side effect to all this is a consumer driven, full frontal assault on our viewing senses. And this brings to mind a much simpler time when drag racers looked mostly like the owners of those sought-after warm butts holding down the grandstands. There is some degree of salvation for drag racing in the “used to be” days, and it’s found in the sportsman pits at major events or your local, weekend drag strip.
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Should your next trip to a major NHRA or IHRA event include a quest to see a bit of this sportsman type action, be prepared to stay on long after the bitter end of the day’s Top Fuel and Funny Car runs have concluded. Because you see, these real race cars and their real owners, builders, crew persons and drivers are allowed to appear only during the secluded, “after-hours” at major events, when the race presenters choose to run off the apparently nuisance portion of the major event big-show. These long suffering, strong willed guys and gals continue to enjoy the simple act of racing, as they pursue their dreams, wearing nothing more than a pair of jeans and a favorite t-shirt. Thank God and that unquenchable urge to race that fuels this shining example of simplicity in appearance and, of course, purpose.
