[Tony Barhorst]

Originally Posted by DAD Charles I am sure Tony's reason for outlawing these shocks was made with the best of intentions, perhaps it would be better were he to ban specific built race cars like the "Munchkin". USAC banned that car years ago only to have it resurface as a championship indoor race car in later years. You should have seen that little thing up at Kittly in the 70's. It was like watching a GoKart run all over and around them big old shiny Real Full Size Midget racers (It wasn't very pretty back then, best I can remember it was painted with spray can robin egg blue paint job). So in the best interest of racing USAC banned the darned thing. It would be interesting to imagine what a midget would look like today had they not put their foot down. Honest Dad himself

Dad is a good car owner, and I just reply here to shine some light on the Munchkin results. We have had 31 features run since 1998. In that span..Tony Stewart has won in a Munckin 7 times, Mike Fedorcak once and Lou Cicconi once. What you describe above has not been happening with all due respect.

Here is a link to our past results. Russ Gamester won last year in a 1977 Grant King chassis, and Justin Peck won in a Beast. http://www.rumbleseries.com/wp-conte...innersList.pdf

I don't mind the feedback.

#respect

[DAD]

Tony

From your statistics you are saying that a "Munchkin" a relative Back Yard built one off race car "Special" has won close to 30% of the races run at the Rumble. That is a very impressive number being that there are probably only half a dozen or so in existence and thousands of Beast, Spikes and Stealths in existence today. A few of those wins might be chalked up to driver ability in fact probably all of them are definitely chalked up to some very experienced drivers being in the seat at the time of their wins. The little car has a "Cult Following" and I know banning it would probably cut into your front gate sales. It has always been "The little car that could" since it first hit the race track. Always being the Giant killer.

Using it as an example was only done to drive home the point of how useless and counter productive it is when a series attempts to control what a racer spends on his race car to make them less expensive to race. Usually these decisions are made arbitrarily and little research is actually given to the decision being made or it's consequences, simply a "fuzzy feel good" type of decision.

NASCAR came up with the car of tomorrow to do this, all it did was cause teams to spend millions of dollars in wind tunnels looking for that little bitty edge over their competition. No one has ever come up with an idea that I know of that would or could keep racers from spending their kids lunch money looking for that edge perceived by them that would make them faster.

A little insight into the racer mind set. They are always watching their competition and trying to figure out just what their competition is doing that is beating them. If they spot something new or different they jump on it.

We have a guy on IOW right now. His specialty is Air cleaners and induction systems for Mini Sprints. He is an avid salesman, and builds a quality product. I gave him a bit of advice last year on how to better sell his product. The advice was we have a couple of brothers up here racing that are smoking the competition, get them to race with your air cleaners and you will sell a lot more air cleaners. He did and now he does.

This strategy has been used over and over again thru the years by many very successful racing company's. When John Godfrey first branched out into chassis production he was lucky enough to have Sammy Swindell race in his Sprint Cars and Ralph Potter began racing his Midget cars. At that time Ralph had just hired this teenage kid by the name of Tony Stewart as a driver. Sammy did what Sammy always did and Tony went on to win his first Midget championship. Following this success John never had much trouble selling race cars. That is just the way racers think, all I need to win is a Stealth, not all I need to win is a Tony or Sammy.

As a side note at about this same time Corey and Chet Fillip of Advanced Racing Suspensions had just introduced their new and revolutionary "ARS cockpit adjustable left rear shock". Ralph was one of the first Midget Race teams to try the new innovation and Tony was one of the first drivers to use one in a race. At the time Tony was a brash super smart Teenager that knew everything about everything. He would come in after a race and almost always he would have the shock adjusted in the wrong direction from where he should have had it adjusted. Ralph in his wisdom left the shock and adjustable knob in the race car he just didn't hook it up to the shock saying nothing to Tony. Ralph's son Tracy would set the shock where he thought it should be for the race and sent Tony out to race and adjust his Knob any way he chose.

Honest Dad himself