[darnall]

The tire companies were the biggest killer of pavement sprint racing...the tires these days are WAY too good when they are brand new and much much worse after they have been heat cycled once...If a small budget team wanted to be competitive with USAC they had to put new tires on the rears and right front a couple times a night..nevermind all the testing that the big budget teams could afford to do to tweak their $4000 shocks just right...

The Must See series has rules in place to limit the amount of new rubber a team can use each night, and the difference in new and used rubber is much less drastic on cars with all that extra aero grip (wings) they have so that makes racing much more affordable in their series...

Seems like a couple years ago Winchester(I think) had a double header with USAC and MustSee on the card the same weekend, and even though there were 30 some sprinters at the track that weekend only 12-14 ran the USAC part of the show...mainly because the MustSee owners couldn't justify buying 8 brand new tires just to run one extra race. Even though all the travel expense was already paid and they were already there it would have been a huge loss for them to enter the USAC portion of the event.

So if you own a pavement car and the racing you have available has no tire purchasing limits you come out money ahead to just let the thing sit in a barn until it rots....and there's not a huge demand for used pavement cars so selling them is hard to do.