Originally Posted by Tony Stewart:
To Mr. Don Moore, I've raced at Ft. Wayne for a long time now and there is one thing that is very obvious. If you spent HALF as much time working on your car as you do ******** about mine, you might have a car that doesn't spin out 5 times per night. I will have my conventional tail tank back on for next years races. I didn't really like the way the new tank looked anyway but knew you would throw a fit over it like you do about everything on my car. I would love to know what else you are going to complain about so i have time to fix it before next years races as well. And for the record, I bought the car from Mike for 15k and the same amount for the car Mike is driving. Im currently buying another munchkin that has recently come up for sale. What i am willing to do is LOAN you the car to enter this coming year free of charge. You can set it up as you like, or i will be more than willing to set it up for you. I understand by watching your car that you sometimes struggle with setups. Please let me know at your earliest convenience if you are interested. As a fellow car owner for two WoO teams, a USAC sprint team, And two silver crown teams i also understand the concern over the cost of open wheel racing. But rest assured, i'm not winning races with a 22yr old car because i spend more than everyone else. If you have paid any attention over the last 6yrs that i've owned the two cars, you would have noticed that any of the parts that we have replaced on the cars are over the counter parts that are available to anyone. Every year around this time everyone has to listen to you ***** about everyone's cars (or mine in particular). I love this sport and most of the people involved, but this has gone on long enough. So again, i will loan you a car next year if you would like. If not, then shut up once and for all and quit whining. Sincerely, Tony Stewart 
It all boils down to "RULES"!!
Good bad or indifferent racing does require rules to level the playing field, but as many well intentioned deeds do sometimes the leveling process make giant mountains. USAC is the eminent sanctioning body for open wheel racing in the USA. Because of that fact many groups look to USAC's rule book when starting an offshoot. Either taking them verbatim or only using a few passages to build their own set of rules. Although USAC is number one that does not make their rules the best. They have spent over 50 years filling this rule book up with rules as they go and very seldom deleting any of them. Many of these rules were put in just to cover one event or person that they saw as a problem to them or to open wheel racing in the past.
By choosing to use USAC rules organizers are saying that they do indeed agree with many of the out dated rules in the book which by now kinda of looks like the "New Testament"
To race we do need rules but do we need so many of them. The rules for a race division should include size of car "wheel base and tread", "maximum and minimum size
of wheel and tires","maximum and minimum weight","Displacement of power plant",and "minimum safety rules for construction of the car and driver protection".
I guess racing came about because people like to race and they then made up the excuse that it was really to develop and refine the automobile. I kinda of like using the latter but admit to falling prey to the former on several occasions.
USAC by having so many rules on the books are in the process of putting the low budget racer out of business. By stipulating the size shape and construction of the tail tank Don has to go out and pay$1600.00 for a tank when in fact because of the small number of laps he usually races he could get buy with a much smaller box shaped fuel cell, probably $400.00 and apply $1200.00 to his tire bill.
The modern progressive approach to racing is to make rules so stringent that in the near future all cars will be the same, much like NASCAR's "Car Of Tomorrow", 600 racing's "Legend Car" or even the old "IROC". When they do this all cars and parts will have to be bought from official licensed manufacture's who will in turn pay the sanctioning body a royalty. That doesn't sound less expensive to me.
Many years ago I was doing some graduate work toward my muffology degree at Ralph's Muffler University at the 16th St. Campus. Ralph was racing Midgets at that time and doing what Ralph does best, working on a new power plant for the Midgets. It was a V6 Chevy. He had already put quite a lot of time and money in that little motor and had gotten most of the bugs out of it. He went out and hired a young "R/C racer sensation" who was "moonlighting" as a race car driver to drive for him. That "V6" must have been a pretty good motor and that kid must have been a pretty good driver because they went out and turned the USAC midget division on it ear and won the Championship that first year out.
USAC must have figured it was the motor that made them so fast because they went about making and changing rules to take the edge away from the motor. That young driver went on to prove them wrong by going out the next year and winning all three divisions. The point is after USAC got done with their rule modifications that motor became obsolete over night.
The Munchkin is another good example where USAC made a very good race car vanish over night. It was not the prettiest car on the track. It did not have many of the off the shelf high teck racing parts on it, but for what it was designed to do it was the best there was. Those pictures a few pages back sure brought about many happy memories. If "FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION" that car was beautiful, every part had a job to do and if it did not need that part to win it was not there. But what the heck it made all those beautiful "Mother of Pearl" and "Candy Apple Red" midgets look like Dinosaurs so what to do get rid of the DARNED thing. Make a rule about the tail tank if that don't get it work on the chassis. All of these things are still on the books and a lot of racers do use these rules to move them selves up in the finish order.
Progressive thinking people feel that everything needs to be micro managed and rules should cover any and all possible outcomes to every event. This is a well intended but ill informed way to look at things.
Ask your self would racing be better if rules were not used to eliminate people and cars that brought forward good ideas. How can any person or for that matter any engineer sit down and handicap a race engine by the number of cylinders, valve arrangement,and or valve number. The best combination will always come to the top and the rest will fall by the way side.
Midgets are racing in the past about 50 years or so, and the reason for that is all of those "well intended" rules***or*** are there "other" reasons for having these rules still on the books.
What I think would really be neat is for Tony Stewart to show up in another outlawed car for the next years "RUMBLE". The Blue and Gold leaf Number 6 powered by the V6 Potter motor.
Honest Dad himself
