good thoughts my dad was john sage caced the RE sprint car in the 70s the car was made by a man who did indy raceing liked it alot but loved sprints the combination did not work on dirt with that said the dream of going from sprint cars to indy car don't work any more look at the facts that when modern sprint car drivers go to indy they crash am going to catch flack for that but oh well the best change would be go back to front engine indy cars and see how that goes lol the dream is there the money is not

Joe Spiker is doing good things. When I was a kid, Monty Miller promoted Gas City and Warsaw, but I think he retired in the 90s? I guess the track owners are the promoters for the most part nowadays. I'm pretty sure USAC does not promote for the circle track shows they sanction, it is up to the tracks. It almost looks like the sport is going to have to become completely non-profitable for any business to get involved. At that point, the people who care about money will leave, the people who love racing will stay. When the people who love racing are the only ones left, the quality of the "overall product" will improve. When you have a better product, it's a lot easier to 'sell'. When it goes back to being awesome again (and I mean the return of the 'ladder' to Indiana), maybe the open wheel racing community will be more careful about who it lets in and why they have come. I believe it was the business people who saw this whole thing as dollar signs in their pocket that have all negatively impacted the quality of open wheel racing. I had the opportunity to speak to a man who admitted to unknowingly being a part of the system that broke the American ladders. Though he helped to break it (and not on purpose), not enough people are listening to his solutions to help repair it.

P.S. I might be wrong, but it looks like things are pretty close to reaching its maximum economies of scale (no room for growth). The entire racing market is looking saturated enough that people are finally going away (red bull, O2, O'Reilly, possibly Lucas Oil, even the Indy engine suppliers don't want to make enough engines for that series, lets see, that's all I can think of off the top of my head right now.) Even someone on this board calling himself Tony Stewart said the USAC opener at Eldora loses money every year, and questioned whether it should remain on the schedule.

I dug through the archives (shoebox) and found these shots from Salem in either the fall of '76 or '77 not positive which, been a while and some of those years were a little foggy then, and they are way foggy now.

I can't tell you who's car it is, it is a rear engine pavement sprinter, it was running an open competition race at Salem.

Keep in mind, these pictures were taken with a 110 Kodak Instamatic, and there is a pretty good chance, the photographer had been drinking. :2:

I do remember it was fast, and in the last picture you can see it made a fast "unplanned" exit, going over the guardrail in turn 3. The driver was OK, but a bit sore I am certain.

Panama - The car is one of Bill Hite's RE/four wheel drive cars. Hard to tell who was in it - he had several drivers over the years.

Thanks for the info!
It was cool to watch and it was fast too!

I appreciate that you are also thinking about the connection. I haven't given up hope. Front engine or rear engine - doesn't really matter. What most people can agree on is that racing is about innovation. There's plenty of money out there, they print more every day!

Rickey Ott?