The irony of it all is that consistantly over the last few years, the USAC midgets have outdrawn many USAC sprint fields, even in double headers.

You know, the cost of engines, at least USAC competitive engines, has always been roughly the same as a upper middle class familys' combined yearly salary or an upper end sports/luxery car. That still holds true to today.

I know that will draw a response such as "so and so ran a $3,000 motor from 72-75 and never even rebulit it", but that just wasn't the case.

In the local sprint scene, there are many used motors from between
$12,000 and $20,000 that are more than capable of winning. With the right driver, you could win a USAC show.

Engines are always the cost that startles people because of their large sum purchase price. To me, the two biggest costs that nag racing right now are rig fuel costs and tires.

For the last 15-20 years,tires have been a major cost and the one that really seperates the haves and have nots. Especially pavement.

For example: I recently helped a team for the Little 500. Low budget deal and we used the 50 instead of 2045 and 2048. We wanted to do the 3 days with two sets of tires, but we had a hard time getting speed early and had to practice more than we wanted. Long story short, we used 2.5 sets of tires(extra rights) for the whole week(Wed.-Sat.) and the costs were around $2,300 dollars. We got $2,000 to start, so no matter what we lost $300 not including fuel,passes and so forth. That's nuts.

Thing is, we were on the low end and many of the USAC teams used more than that just for Wed. practice and race.

We can talk motors all we want, but tires are the major problem and cost drag right now.