This sure doesn't sound like a dead horse wooping contest to me. Long time ago when I got into mini sprint a friend of mine told me his son was racing Mini Sprints at the Little Salem race track. Neither of these things meant anything to me. I thought Salem had only one race track and his kid was only 12 years old. This was before Jef Gordon made his debut. Anyway's I went to the race and was hooked that first night. There was nothing mini about the race I watched and Salem Indiana does in fact have two race tracks.

This was back in the early 90's and "Mini" was still a fresh term and it was not something we worried about. The motorcycle powered midget chassis based race car was developed here in Indiana and we got a pretty good jump on the rest of the country. If you would like go to the AMSA web site they have a very short history of "Mini Sprints", actually a Doctor here in New Albany was one of the first people to see the importants and future of mini sprints.

Back then the world of outlaws was just getting hot. And every body in racing was talking about them. Like I said whatever "the world of outlaws" did we did too but on a smaller scale. As time went by the term "MINI" lost its luster. People began trying new names to bring us up with the times. Problem whenever you catch up with the times time leves you behind again. MINI was a good term for the 90's and 20th century It said what we were "World of Outlaw" wanabee's.

Now in the 21 st century some guy up in "Canada" puts on his "Mr Know It All Hat" and says All of you dumbies down in the United States are way off base, you need to do things the way we do it up here in Canada, after all I'm a "pro race announcer" and I need to tell you guys how to do things to get it right. Reminds me of the story about "the guy who had 50 hot dog stands all over the city, he was doing very well and he sent his son to college to study business, well after 4 year in school the kid comes back and tell dad that he is doing things all wrong and begins to change the way his dad did business because he was college educated. Well his dad went out of business in 6 months and last heard his kid was up in New York at a sit in on wall street.

PP OUTLAW I know all about advertising and how much it costs If you say muffler shop in Louisville Ky. people will say Dad's Muffler Shop "NO MUFF TOO TUFF" I had "TOMA" top of mind awareness! You can not Even guess what 3 TV station and 4 radio stations cost me a year + a full page in the yellow pages. Just because some guy in Canada says "lightning" is the word doesn't make it so. If you drank his Kool Aid and a lot of you guys starting out in the last couple of years did. It is not "etched it in stone".

WHAT IM SAYING IS THINK-TALK-LISTEN! Maybe "MINI" was not a good term, worked great for us back then but it got dated. I dont think "LIGHTNING" is any better, it doesn't describe the car at all. "NASCAR" and "USAC" and even "AMSA" have been around long enough that people know what they represent even if they don't know what the letters stand for. We need to gracefully work our way away from the terms "MINI & LIGHTNING" and maybe even sprint and come up with a name for our racers that describes what they are and what they do in a better fashion. We have already Heard from Bill May about MMSA and I would bet a dollar to a donut that Jerry Tague isn't going to change AMSA either. We dont't have to change the name of the club only the car description .



MMSA LITER MIDGET
AMSA MIDGET-LITE
XXXX TECHNO SPRINT
xxxx 3/4 sprint