{"id":23150,"date":"2025-10-02T02:30:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T06:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/competitionplus.com\/?p=23150"},"modified":"2025-10-02T14:36:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T18:36:03","slug":"bobby-bennett-why-the-good-old-days-arent-better-than-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/competitionplus.com\/bobby-bennett-why-the-good-old-days-arent-better-than-today\/","title":{"rendered":"BOBBY BENNETT: WHY THE \u201cGOOD OLD DAYS\u201d AREN\u2019T BETTER THAN TODAY"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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You simply cannot present this argument in 600 words or fewer. It\u2019s a long read.<\/p>

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Drag racing fans love to reminisce. Flaming burnouts, match races under the lights, the fire-breathing Funny Cars, the legends hauling their dragsters behind a pickup truck \u2014 they all make for vivid memories. It is tempting to believe those \u201cgood ol’ days\u201d were the sport\u2019s peak.<\/p>

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But as romantic as the past feels, the truth is that the modern era has surpassed it in nearly every measurable way.<\/p>

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The first step in that conversation is respect. The racers of the 1960s and ’70s built the foundation. They made the sport a spectacle with ingenuity and courage, often working out of small garages and using borrowed parts. That scrappy culture gave drag racing its soul. Nostalgia has its place, and those memories matter.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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But nostalgia can blur reality. In the 1960s, Top Fuel dragsters ran the quarter-mile in the seven-second range at barely 200 miles per hour. Today, they cover 1,000 feet in 3.6 seconds at speeds topping 340. The performance leap is staggering. Nitro cars make over 11,000 horsepower, requiring complete teardowns after every run. In the \u201cgood ol’ days,\u201d pistons, rods, and even blocks were reused until they finally failed. Now, they are treated as consumables because the engines push physics to the edge.<\/p>

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Safety is another area where the present is stronger. The old days carried an aura of danger because fires and explosions were common, and many drivers paid the ultimate price. Modern cars are engineered to give racers a chance to walk away from 330-mph incidents that would have previously been certain fatalities. The spectacle remains, but survival rate is vastly higher.<\/p>

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All of this advancement comes at a price, though. Developing stronger chassis, safer cockpits and better equipment has added millions to the cumulative cost of running nitro cars — and that’s not counting the go-fast parts. What once was ingenuity with a torch and welder is now engineering with computers and specialized materials, and the bill reflects that shift.<\/p>

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Finances tell a similar story. In 1965, winning a national event might mean a $1,500 paycheck. By the mid-1980s, Don Garlits recalled his Top Fuel program costing nearly $900,000 a year to operate. The champion of the 1985 NHRA U.S. Nationals pocketed $30,000, which would be about $90,000 when adjusted for inflation. Today, it costs roughly $3 to $5 million to field a competitive car for the season.<\/p>

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GET 10% OFF YOUR RACE TICKETS – USE CODE\u00a0 – COMPETITIONPLUS10<\/a><\/h4>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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That daunting expense has produced an obvious effect; i.e., short fields at NHRA events from time to time. What does one expect when costs have more than quadrupled? It is one of the reasons fans no longer see nitro cars barnstorming the country in match races. Nitro, Pro Stock and even Pro Modified priced themselves out of the exhibition business. The professional show moved from the smaller strips to the national stage, where costs could be absorbed through sponsorships and television.<\/p>

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And then there are those who don\u2019t even go to the races but routinely devalue an event because of what they see in grandstands that are not filled to capacity.<\/p>

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Bear in mind, those grandstands are often more than triple the size of the facilities that defined the sport\u2019s golden age. A crowd that looked like a sellout at York or Lions wouldn\u2019t fill a third of zMAX Dragway or Route 66 Raceway. Smaller venues bursting at the seams looked impressive, but the modern facilities were built to host tens of thousands more people.<\/p>

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One track GM told me that their average national-event attendee watches about nine pairs of cars before moving on. That speaks to a very different audience than the 1970s, when fans often planted themselves in the bleachers for an entire day of racing. Back then, the novelty of nitro thunder and door-car eliminations was enough to hold attention from sunrise to sunset. Today\u2019s fans, with more entertainment choices and shorter attention spans, consume racing in bursts, stepping in and out of the action much like they do with their phones and streaming platforms.<\/p>

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Drag racing has adapted by providing multiple ways to follow the action. Fans can watch live streams, keep tabs with live timing, or refresh the Old Faithful of drag racing websites, dragracecentral.com, for results. Years ago, the most committed fans picked up the telephone and dialed a 1-900 number just to hear Dave McClelland (Castrol GTX Hotline) or Bret Kepner (IHRA Hotline) recap the day\u2019s action. Today, websites like CompetitionPlus.com not only deliver results but also the stories behind them. Race fans have become so spoiled they often take for granted the efforts put in to deliver those stories. Hours of research and reporting go into presenting the facts, only for a social media visitor to comment without even reading them. But I digress.<\/p>

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The explosion of digital media has given the sport more reach than ever before. Social media platforms, especially YouTube, have created a vast library where fans can watch both modern and classic races with ease. A fan who once had to wait weeks for a magazine to arrive in the mailbox can now relive Don Garlits\u2019s catostrophic transmission explosion at Lions or Matt Hagan\u2019s latest Funny Car victory instantly. The accessibility is unprecedented.<\/p>

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Fans themselves live in a different world today. With the click of a mouse or the swipe of a screen, they can watch races in real time from anywhere. Those who complain about a delayed TV broadcast forget what came before. In the 1970s, fans relied on National DRAGSTER to find the date, time and network of Diamond P’s syndicated broadcast. That one-hour show often skipped qualifying and sometimes ignored Pro Stock altogether. On the rare occasions the program included Pro Stock coverage beyond the semifinals, it felt like Christmas morning. And before that, drag racing was featured on ABC\u2019s Wide World of Sports — maybe, if we were lucky, twice a year.<\/p>

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Today, fans have more coverage than they can consume. It is easy to take for granted the ability to watch Stock Eliminator from an NHRA divisional event at 8 a.m. without leaving home. In earlier decades, sportsman racing was something you only saw in person. Remember the Modified Eliminator eliminations from an NHRA Division 2 event in Blaney, S.C.? No fan outside the gates ever saw those runs. Now, the smallest details of the sport are at a fan\u2019s fingertips.<\/p>

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The same applies to independent promotions. Consider Donald Long\u2019s Duck X Production small-tire events. In the past, unless one of the major magazines covered it, most fans would never know those races happened. And even then, coverage often centered more on the reporter than the event itself. Now, events like those have global reach, streamed live to audiences far larger than any bleacher could hold.<\/p>

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And then there is the myth of \u201cthe good ol’ days\u201d itself. At one of the more popular nostalgia Funny Car shows years ago — 2005 — in Englishtown, more than 30 cars showed up. It looked like a time machine, but the reality on the starting line told a different story. One car broke on the burnout. The next shut off at 300 feet. Another wouldn\u2019t fire, while the next pair produced a red light and a broken motor. The next Funny Car pair in line fired up, staged, and one of them exploded the supercharger, launching the body straight off 50 feet from the line. A younger racer standing nearby laughed and asked if this was what the good ol’ days were really like. The answer was simple: Yes. Cars looked great, burnouts were spectacular, but side-by-side races were rare and breakage was constant. The nostalgia show proved the reality many older fans either forgot or never admitted.<\/p>

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Pro Stock tells a similar story. People call it the class of close competition, but the facts say otherwise. In the 1970s and even as late as the ’90s, the gaps were massive. The Nos. 1 and No. 2 qualifiers were often a tenth ahead of the rest of the field, and the bump spot could be half a second behind. Remember that famous 1970 Indy final with Arlen Vanke, Herb McCandless, and the Sox & Martin Duster? It\u2019s the one that produced a memorable side-by-side moment, but it was rare \u2014 so rare it still gets replayed 50 years later. More often, fields were strung out and first-round matchups were foregone conclusions.<\/p>

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