Reply To: Shameful price gouging by big shops at the Supernationals

[Carl Freese]

Howie, I second your thoughts and I will commend you for not blasting them by name on the forums. That shows your class with this matter that had many of us racers scrambling and very frustrated over the three solid days of rain.

I will start my 2 cents on the matter now. I keep hearing about shops/teams/racers not being prepared for this, what about SKUSA? I know that they where trying as hard or harder than all of us to get tires brought in starting on Thursday when it looked like the weather was going to hang around. If they couldn’t get them, then what chance did anyone else have? At that point is when the problem needed to be addressed. We were asked the next morning at the drivers meeting about who had no tires and we were then instructed to give our contact info to registration and that they were working on something, but the tires wouldn’t be in until Saturday. Well Saturday came and still no tires. There were no further announcements about it, just deal with it was the basic sentiment from any official that was asked about the tires. To make it worse was that fact that they announced that you would be DQ’d from the event if you were caught practicing on another brand of rain tire. I get the fact that they want everyone on the right tire, but when you have an extreme shortage of that tire, they should have allowed practice on whatever you could get out on the track with. Instead myself, my son and many others sat and watched practice even though we had other branded rains to run.

Then there was the fact that you could not borrow someone else’s tires after they had been scanned in. “That would encourage cheating” was the answer I was given. That is just a lack of thinking in my opinion. As long as each driver did not have more than 2 sets scanned to them, it shouldn’t matter how many drivers use that set. I can see if I have two sets and then I borrow another set, yes, now I have used 3 sets and would have an advantage. But I was trying to use a set and it would be the only set I was going to get and it still did not matter.

I just feel that there solutions out there and nobody wanted to talk about the elephant in the room. Don’t tell me that we were all unprepared for this race, the suppliers were as unprepared as we were. If I forgot an axle, it wouldn’t cost $1000 just because I bought it at the track? As a racer you expect to be able to buy “consumable” items at the track without any major gouging. For the 2 classes that we were running we had a total of 3 chassis, 5 engines, 12 axles, 8 chains, 4 sprocket carriers, 10 tie rods+heims, ect… We just needed some rain tires as it turns out.

As for a solution?? I don’t believe in just complaining about something unless I can help find a solution. One solution could have been to let a couple of other classes run on the mojo rains. They could have had people in those classes trade their MG’s in and then those could have been sold to someone that was running a class using them. That could have also been done using bridgestones also. Just like when we used to have to turn in your race tires before the event and then they would give you back however many sets that you turned in. That was done to prevent people from cheating with their tires, but the same concept could have worked well and just been modified to put different classes on different tires and everyone could have practiced and raced.

I understand the need to follow the rules, however there needs to be room for flexibility under an extreme circumstance and I’m sure that I am not the only one that feels that way. What would happen if there was a problem with the fuel? or the oil? I believe that a few years ago there was a problem with the oil that was “spec” and people were sticking engines so they allowed the use of whatever oil? I’m not 100% on that, but it was something like that.

I guess I’m just trying to say that this was a major issue and it was pushed under the rug like it was only a few people. I can only hope that everyone involved in this learns from the frustrations that took away from what has been a great event for many years. I just don’t like the finger being pointed at the racers as it is all our own fault. As I said, we all had a part to play in it and I am not on here to blame anyone, I am just putting out my opinion and offering some solutions that I think could have worked and made a better week of racing.