If I Were King...

Things would be different if I was King. In the words of Glenn Beck, but hopefully not in his style, "I have a list..."

Maybe the first thing I would do if I was King was put news back on Headline News and send Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace back to whence they came. A disgrunted partisan hack and Roland Friesler in nice clothes - I certainly never asked for either one.

But I digress. If I were King, I'd bring Pro Mod and AA/FA back to the NHRA. I was never sure what the movitation for killing Pro Mod was, but in retrospect it seems obvious it was a mistake. Cars with huge V-8s and blowers sticking out of their hoods? What's not to like? This isn't to take anything away from Pro Stock, which is certainly cool in its own right, but c'mon, we're talking about big blowers here!

I read in a book a while back that the NHRA scuttled the AA/FA ("Fuel Altered") class because of the popularly of Funny Cars and the fact that AA/FA cars were more or less indistinguishable from Funny Cars anyway. True? I don't know. I've only seen two FA cars run in person in my life, and most of what I know about the class comes from old magazines and books, so I may not have the slightest idea of what I'm talking about. But I do know that at my local drag strip, as soon as a FA car fires up, everyone stands up and all the guys that were in line to get Cokes at the snack bar or get rid of Cokes at the bathroom turn around to watch the run. Now, this is against a backdrop of cars that, while impressive and fast on their own, are not powered by nitromethane. If there were a bunch of top fuelers or funny cars there, would anyone give a hoot about a Fuel Altered with a ridiculous Topolino body?

Of course they would! They would because I, as King, would decree that it be so.

(Tellingly enough, I've seen about nine FA runs, and only one of them was clean. The others were marred by blown engines, wall rubs and other hijinks brought on by piling too much horsepower on too little car. But that one clean run, somewhere in the vicinity of 5.4 seconds if I remember correctly, that was magic. And there was no prying the grin off the driver's face.)

And while I'm at it, I would decree that the NHRA continue to get crappy TV coverage. One of my greatest fears (in drag racing anyway) is that the NHRA will suddenly become hugely and peculiarly popular for no apparent reason in the way the NASCAR suddenly became hugely and peculiarily popular. I think that would be bad.

Pinks is bad enough. People turn on this wretched program and think they're going to be watching drag racing, but it is to drag racing as the WWE is to Greco-Roman wrestling. It's all a bunch of ego-fueled posing and bad-mouthing, exactly the kind of Dueling Testicles crap I don't want to watch on TV. They could settle the matter at hand within the first 15 seconds of the show. Start your damn cars, get in, and race. But no. The principals must bop heads in a metaphorical sense, shout hoarse nonsense, threaten to take their basketballs and go home, and suddenly remember they were scheduled for tap dance lessons and can't race after all.

And when they do race, some guy waves them off the line with his hat. What is this, a time warp? Is it 1951 again? You mean to say we installed all those fancy timing systems at our drag strips so we can ignore them and wave cars off with our hats?

Oh, right. It's not about racing. It's about drama.

My mistake.