tire rule

[jracer98]

I was interested in the ROMCO post but what I was curious about was a little off topic...

At one time, there was a 1 tire a week rule at SA. It was at least 10 years ago. I assumed it failed. Why?

Thanks

Jay

[NickHolt]

jracer98,

 

The one tire per week rule worked fine and saved most teams money. I know, because I was the one who instituted the rule when I was Competition Director at SAS. I didn't come up with the concept, I just contacted Beech Ridge Motor Speedway and asked if I could use their rules. After some minor modifications to the rules to fit our situation, I implemented the rule.

 

While there certainly were some teething problems - any major rules change is going to have a period of adjustment - in general the rule:

1) took away the major advantage the teams who could afford unlimited tires enjoyed. 2) gave the teams who were used to buying the "take-offs" from the "rich" teams a chance to be on equal quality tires as the "rich" teams.

3) created enforcement problems requiring a tech official dedicated to just tire rule enforcement.

 

To answer you specific question, the reason the one-tire-per week rule was discontinued was because the owner failed to meet his financial obligations to the person who sold him the track and the track was re-possessed. The new track management, for whatever reason, discontinued the one-tire-per-week rule. It should be noted that I resigned my position at SAS as the Competition Director towards the end of the 1995 season after not getting paid for nearly an entire season by the aforementioned track owner.

 

While such a rule does even the competition, it should be noted that during the time the one-tire rule was in effect at SAS, the track actually sold more tires per overall and when looked at per team. This was the same thing Beech Ridge discovered shortly after they went to the one-tire rule. It seems that everyone buying one tire a week instead of a few teams buying lots of tires per week produced higher tire sales. I thought that was interesting since I would have thought that tire sales would have gone down instead.

 

Nick Holt