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The promoters and sprint car race teams in Indiana have always seemed to sabotage themselves and each other when it comes to cooperation and race payouts. For decades now, it has been a regular occurrence for tracks to refuse to cooperate because “we’re running a business”. When a track or series has scheduled a decent or even well-paying event, there almost always seems to be at least one other track that will schedule against it with a lower paying event. The “budget” race teams then suppprt the lower paying event and in many cases the track paying the significantly lower purse draws more cars than the track paying the larger purse for a special event. That causes promoters to question why would they would take the risk to pay a bigger purse and draw fewer cars than paying pennies and still getting plenty of cars. The result is payouts stay low compared to sprint car races in other areas and race teams continue to race for weekly purses. Weekend racers are a huge part of the sport, but Indiana will remain behind what you see from sprint car teams in other areas like Pennsylvania which race for more money every week and get larger paying events throughout the season. Most tracks stay alive based upon profits they generate from one big event or a few big events on their schedule. Weekly racing isn’t profitable for most tracks, and the lack of support for big events has led to the situation Indiana tracks have now. That’s why some tracks are closed and others have reduced their schedule or gone to special events only. Why open the gates every week just to break even or lose money. If the tracks in Indiana were willing to cooperate on scheduling and the race teams would actually support the larger paying events, it could benefit the tracks and teams in this area to create something like this PA Posse tour on a smaller scale. Bringing back the KISS series would be a good start.
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