Forum: HoseHeads Sprint Car General Forum (go)
Moderators: dirtonly  /  dmantx  /  hosehead

Have been listening to a few of the older guys open red interviews. Bobby Allen etc. 

Thought it was interesting/entertaining how they used to do it back then, sleeping in the truck, showering in lakes/pools. Open trailers and what not. They would race in the summer and work in the winter. 

Do you think people could achieve this today? If they were as dedicated as the guys were back then! Set out with an open trailer for the summer and have at it! Obviously not to win championships etc. but make enough off of the purse to get by like they used to.

* NOTE: This is just an interesting/enjoyable topic with some great stories, not something being done. 
 

I don't believe you could do it with today;s needs. Just for a comparison, and this is a small one, but the first year Ryan Smith went out on the All Star tour, the biggest problem he found was that he didn't come with a big enough trailer and could obly cary so much spare parts and such.

So when he had crashes and breaks, it was very hard for him to put together a good car to compete with and when others were refreshing every so many races, he had to wait until he was in a good location tour wise to get to the shop or get other stuff to him. Which is how the 59 team deal came together, as it provided him the large trailer needed to be competetive.

The Open Trailer is cool and it;s old school for one/2 nights to get somewhere, but reasonably with todays needs, you can't tour like like that.

You would have a hard time finding people that wanted to do this today.  Travel costs so much today.  Few  tracks have showers, do you want to go for a week or more without a bath?  Do you want to eat cold meat sandwiches or MacDonalds $1.00 hambergers?  B mains pay very little, and you would be in alot of B mains.  I once cashed a guys purse check at the track so he could make it to next race.  He was broke. In the old days you could cobb a 400HP engine back together to race, but today you could not do the same with a 800HP plus engine.  One good thing about America, is if you want to try it, do it.  You will not know unless you try.

Many drawbacks to trying this today.  Among them, your competition has so much good equipment.  You need all the stagger options on your trailer, you need a good selection of shocks and bars.  The fast guys all handle really good and you just can't drive around missing the setup.  Your engine needs to be a pretty good hitter and they take maintenance.  You need a quad at a minimum.  Back in the say there were plenty of people hanging around to help push the car to staging, now a days people would look at you like you were nuts if you asked for a hand pushing the car.  No crew guy is going to want to play that game, and doing it alone is damn near impossible.  We also have the issue that things will get stolen if not locked up securely, it happened to Robert Bell a few years back.  

       Isn't this pretty much what the Shark team is doing now?