What's going to grab the youth of today and make him want to get involved in the sport?
I'll tell you one thing, its not forty to fifty thousand dollar engines.
He wants something in the twenty thousand dollar range.
Kevin, ask your buddies at Mopar a question. If Sprint Car racing did away with all engine and fuel rules, could they build,
and sell a competitive engine for that kind of money? They say yes and everything you want comes true.
Don

Ok, its your right not to respond.

Can anyone disagree?

If you use the current car-tire rules, and went to an open fuel-engine rule, a top team could win and top 5 consistently with a $25,000 engine against whatever the competition wanted to spend.

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.

The engine we ran was one that he purchased for $10,000 from Jimmy Laser three years ago. He used to run it on dirt but bought another motor from Tony Epperson.

He runs them and then rebulids them each year for around $2,000-$3,000 ea.

i agree with leaders edge on this i can tell you for a fact that you can piece a decent motor together for under 10,000 let alone 20 its the tires and fuel cost that keep us for running alot not the motor....

What kind of horsepower are you getting out of that motor?
Its competitive in the USAC National Sprint Series?

on the smaller tracks i have been told that this motor would compete with the usac cars if we were to go to say eldora we would be hurtin but in my time wtching racing which has been a little while its not always the big motor that gets the job done evryone thinks you need a huge ground puonding motor but when it comes down to theres enough horsepower and then there is to much... i mean hell the cars only way 1300lbs roughly so theres a breaking point there somewhere, just my opinion....