One thing that I think gets lost in these conversations (this was stimulated by the discussion about television) is that USAC is far, far from great shape financially. There have been a succession of blows beginning with the loss of the IRL and in particular the 500, many people forget that that the US GP was sanctioned by USAC and was not an insignificant source of revenue, and the last television deal was a dollars and cents disaster. You have to pay for television now and at the moment USAC doesn't have a Lucas Oil or something similar to support them. There have been a variety of cutbacks to keep the ship from taking on more water. Any rehash of the reasons this happened is irrelevant at this time except for those areas where history should not be repeated. Two important area of historical context is the once golden road to NASCAR has narrowed considerably - and some of the growth in areas like midget racing involved the emergence of the wealthy family bankrolling a racing operation (I'm not being critical of this - we all do whatever we can to forward the aspirations and dreams of our kids) as opposed to the "sportsman" owner (like Ralph Potter, Dave Calderwood etc). Then certainly the economy - meaning finding Lucas Oil has become more difficult. For teams in the end it seems like some have decided to race closer to home (Bloomington for one has had excellent sprint car counts) and think even more seriously about the bottom line (i.e. the Billy Puterbaugh debate that erupted on this board). People mention what happened at Belleville and often point to the car count drop and attribute that to USAC - but BELLEVILLE changed (as did Knoxville). It almost used to be more about the party (should have been the Gretchen Wilson Belleville Nationals) than the racing. It was pure fun. Picnics, squirt gun fights during the qualification draw, stink bombs and cutting up at the Belle-Villa motel- then all of a sudden it was knit-brow serious. In the past people would haul their car out there (in better economic times) and if they raced pretty well and made the A that was great - it was more of a vacation. It became less fun when times got tougher, the chance of being truly competitive diminished, and all you had at the end of the day was a depleted checkbook.