First off I applaud NHRA and I wish more racing series and tracks would think this way!

NHRA has added a series where you compete in 10 events but you also only count the top 7 for points.
The series will compete at 10 events during the season and will count points from their best seven of 10 finishes
toward the year-end championship, which will award a cash purse of $4,500 to the top three finishers with the
champion also receiving an NHRA Championship Wally trophy and jacket.

If I had a series or track series for sprint car racing or any class of racing I would seriously think about what NHRA did above.

In life people have things come up life like vacation, marriage, children special events like graduation, funerals, sickness
in the family and many other things that one needs to do other than racing. What we need is some mulligans!

You only have to miss one event and you are out of the championship hunt. In many cases car count at the end of the
year will dwindle because of missing races. Last few years our teams manage to miss a race. Instead of finishing top 3
we finished 7th to 9th place and that is not reflective of how good a team we had.

I guess their is a balance here between going to a race because you don't have a chance to win the championship.
For example if i win 7 races I don't have to compete in 3, that is not good for car count, tracks or series. On the
other hand if I or lots of other team miss a race or two, We are all apt to not run a couple of races because I am out
of the hunt for championship. So its a balancing act of time, money and the competition!

What a series and tracks needs is car count. Car count gets the track not only back gate but fans of that car in the front
gate. Also without car count you don't get tire and fuel sales. You don't sell a lot of food. Without car count its a disaster
to make and pay the purses. The tracks and series have to have some flexibility to come up with a way to allow a racer to
miss a race or 2 but maintain the highest possible car count over the season.

One and done for the year is not working for many teams and hurts tracks and series sponsors. During these hard times
we need to think of some out of the box ideas to keep the tracks and series alive. Please comment on your ideas and
just maybe we can get a track or series to adopt a mulligan or two.

Don Wilshe
Biobased USA
800 995-9203
www.biobased-racing.com
donwilshe@biobased.us

PS. Thanks for the comment wideopen24. You could still race all the races and drop your lowest races as per each series.

I know the Lucas Oil Late Model Series awards "hardship points" to drivers who can't attend for various reasons. The drivers vote on it during the drivers meeting. I think they award the same amount of points as starting the feature.

I figured they was really handing out "Perfect Attendance Awards" a long time ago. If racing is what you do then go for it. If you have other priorities don't even worry about the "Jacket" Life is too short.

True by going to a format where a team could drop a couple of bad outings the Promoters might just increase their car count because all of a sudden they could have many other teams chasing that award, shucks after one bad night why even worry.

Honest Dad himself

Aaron Fry did this in 2012 with the traveling BOSS Series. Teams were able to drop their lowest points night. I was not able to make the first race of the season due to a make up race else where and used this to stay top 3 in points while the rest of the top 10 teams competed in all events! I wouldn't have consdered traveling with BOSS without this concept because of it came close to a Championship thanks to Aaron's idea!

Thanks for the positive replies!

Its really helpful to post about other series that have tried this mulligan scoring over the years. We
used to do this on the internet sim racing and it really helped in the virtual world so I don't see
why it wont work in the real world. Give me the good, bad and ugly comments about success and
failures of series that have tried anything like this!!

DW

One of the biggest reasons more series don't do this is because it makes it hard to commit a car count number to a couple of particular tracks... there will always be one or 2 races on a schedule that are ill timed, or a much farther drive than most, or a track that historically eats equipment...if you give everybody a mulligan race you risk having one or 2 shows at those tough to get to tracks that everybody picks as their drop race and stays home...a series that always carries 15-25 cars could easily end up with only 6 regulars at one particular race....

POWRI is a good example of this...they used to have one race at one track in Iowa every year that typically only had 13-16 cars show up, even though they were drawing 30-50 at every race closer to their base....If POWRI had allowed the teams to drop a race or 2, how many of those 15 cars that went to Iowa would have just stayed home? Allowing a drop would have possibly caused them to have a show that fewer than 8 cars came to.

As a racer on a non existent budget I totally agree with the concept of allowing a drop or 2...but from the promoter side I completely understand why many series are afraid to offer such a thing.

I don't think I ever heard of tracks eating equipment until I started attending races in Indiana/ must be a hoosier allergy I recon, one imagined by promoters with teeny weenies? agreed, in this day and age, often times the promoters rely on the back gate to crack a profit and they always like fielding a full field of cars for their fans, so I can see their point

Been a few years ago, but SIRA, Southern Indiana Racing Association, go-karts, a street racing based organization, institued this proceedure, and as tensions were getting heated anyway, because they drew Karts from all over, I mean ALL OVER, it really put the "homie" feel back into racing, no more pulling 200+ miles, and having a chain break, or an engine sieze, or a hay bale jump off the curb at you, and you were screwed, you put it in your trash bag, and recovered, and business did pick up, maybe not always the same guys, but everyone "ran" the same number of races, or "counted" if you prefer, and it soon became the norm, and people became friends again, for me, my closest race was at least a hundred miles away, and we were running almost every,weekend, so a real job, almost was a thing to do, between races. Anyway, it was a hard sell at first, but soon became the "way" to do things. Bob

Powri drops two races but if u want to win u have to attend them all. If you can run 30+ races with no problems....... Well you must have chad knaus working for your team lol

Championships are only for the people who are willing to sacrifice everything for one common goal. Not counting every race is like giving a kid that just tries a trophy. They don't throw out bad games/losses in football, baseball, basketball. It is like saying you took ten tests and you got A's on seven of them but the other 3 you failed and then trying to say you got straight A's because "I'm not going to count those F's cause I didn't try". Thats not what anyone would consider "A heart of a champion" What do you think Chad and Jimmy are thinking about today on Christmas. Being better than they were last year hell I wouldn't doubt that chad will spend some time in the race shop today. Ugh rant ended.