Originally Posted by openwheel44:
Hey Dad..............if you are reading this thread.............maybe now you can see why some of us are calling ourselves LIGHTNING SPRINTS. Avoids a lot of confusion. LOL
Phil
Sorry for the late post but been busy getting ready.
My daddy told me many years ago that when making a decision about anything whether it be gear ratio, jet size or even marriage you are almost always better sticking to your initial decision. I met Bill May 20 or so years ago, he was running the "Buckeye Mini Sprints" at the time. We had just been banned from "Wonder Valley" at Salem Indiana because we decided to run a new fangled Mini Sprint built by A guy named John Godfrey up in Indianapolis. The car was named "Stealth". It was a long wheel based, Very highly offset to the left side race car based on his standard Midget Chassis John was building at the time.. The promoters at "Wonder Valley" told us that if we wanted to race with them we needed either buy a Bailey or ERC race car and when compared to the Stealth at that time these cars were about 20 year behind the Stealth in development.. Well running what everybody else runs is not my style so we went looking for another place to race and good old Bill said he would be happy to let us race with the Buckeye Mini Sprints.
One thing about them Ohio racers, they sure like to put a lot of money in their motors, and maybe a few of them even put a lot of Nitro in their tank. You can not imagine the look on their faces when a punk 12 year old kid from Kentucky beat their asses with a stock engine gasoline powered F-2 Honda. We just out handled them with that funny looking race car. DA!!!
Did you catch the part about what kind of frame we used. It was a Midget Chassis with a 1/8" smaller top rail and a chain drive. Everything on this car came right from the midget parts that John used on his Midgets. Bird cages, shocks, radius rods, nerf bars (that is another B1tch of mine),brakes, gas peddle, brake peddle, seat, body panels, tail tank and bladder, and anything else you can name on the car except the engine and drive train is simply just plain old off the shelf Midget.
Now a couple of people with great ideas and thinking them selves to be very forward thinkers read an article written by some guy from up in Canada who claimed to be God's next Humpy Wheeler. He decides that "Mini-Sprint" was a too self depreciating name for our race cars and he decided on his own that in order to grow the class we needed a new more up to date name. Somehow after many public surveys and a great deal of market research he decided on "LIGHTNING SPRINT" as the perfect name. Lightning being so fast and easy for fans to get their heads around. This was the same guy that thought 750cc's was the perfect size engine for our cars. His racing group later switched over to 1000cc's for motor size.
Some of you guys drank his Kool Aid and decided to name your "NEW" organizations "LIGHTNING SPRINT". That is fine with me however, in doing so you also deluded and confused the meaning of a class of race car formerly known exclusively as Mini-Sprint. Check out the title on the oldest and most prestigious web sites for our type race car.
http://www.minisprintracing.com/
He hasn't changed his name yet.
Now I guess just like Mini-Sprint racers, there are probably some forward "Progressive People" racing Micro Midgets. Micro Midgets have existed since the early 50's. I guess they thought well those racers in the Mini Sprint race cars are throwing away their name of "Mini-Sprint" and it sure sounds better than Micro Midget , or Sidewinder so since they don't want it why don't we use that name instead and they did.
So here we are!!!!!
After much thought I have decided that the we probably did make a mistake when we first named our race cars Mini-Sprints. There is nothing about our car's except the wing perhaps that even vaguley resembles a Sprint car, and even some racers on the East Coast are racing Midgets with Wings on them.
When I got ejected from "Wonder Valley" the reason they gave me was I was wanting to race a Midget Chassis and it just wasn't like a Mini Sprint at all. Guess what? Twenty plus years later now what do we see, but a bunch of racers changing their Mini Sprints over to look just like the Midget chassis car that we got banned from racing Mini Sprints with so many years ago. We now have people buying Midget Chassis race cars and converting them over to race Mini Sprints, and personally, that is GREAT !!
One thing seems to be very common when talking about Mini-Sprints and that is that they are based off of a Midget Chassis. Had Mini Sprints been developed in the late 60's they would have been called simply Midget race cars, because at that time chain drive was not banned by USAC in their rule book. A good friend of mine single handedly caused the change of USAC's thinking on chain drive when he developed an oversize 1/4 midget race car powered by a rear engined VW chain drive set up. He later went on to cause USAC to ban all V6 motors from competition in Midget racing.
Now with all of our enlightenment why don't we just name our cars for what they really are are. We are in fact racing "1000cc Midgets." I think perhaps even 1000cc might be a little too restricting, have you see what happened to the 1200 cc motors. Engine size changes year by year depending on what the bike manufactures feel they need to build in order to sell bikes.
To be accurate we need to ditch the names of Mini> Lightning> and yes even Sprint from our name.
Honest Dad himself
